Shoutout Q&A with Caroline Giudice
Author of “Van Cleef” in BULL Literary Magazine
Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A.
Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Caroline Giudice’s genre-bending romance “Van Cleef” (3,100 words) in BULL Literary Magazine. I strongly recommend reading this great short story (via the link above), if you haven’t already, before dipping into this interview.
Caroline is a British writer living in Italy. Her work explores grief, time, and the small ruptures that go unnoticed and unsaid in ordinary lives. She holds a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing. Her website, Tales of the Hidden Hour, offers a blend of science fiction, fantasy, horror and psychological thriller. Her stories explore the eerie and the unsettling.
You can also check out Caroline’s “The Loan” which has just been published in The Waterdog Magazine.
And right before going to press with this interview, Caroline scored another acceptance! Look for her story “The Bank” in an upcoming issue of Headcanon Magazine (we’ll for sure ring the bell at Shoutout when it’s available for reading.)
Thanks for your time today, Caroline. If you don’t mind, could you indulge us with some background on your geographical status? Being a British writer working in Italy is pressing all our Europhile buttons :) And any thoughts on how the mixing of those two cultures has affected your work?
I’m in Sicily, and have been since 2007—though Italy and I go back further. I first visited in 1997, came and went through the early 2000s, and settled properly nearly twenty years ago.
I’ll be honest with you, though, because I’d rather be honest than give the romantic answer—I don’t think Italy changed how I write. What changed my writing was losing my mother. Before that, I saw life through a kind of veil. When she passed, the veil dropped. I write about time now because I can’t stop thinking about it—how she aged without my noticing, how I still see her as young even now. That’s the real engine. Italy is where I happen to be standing while I write it, and it’s a beautiful place to stand—it took me over a decade to truly see how beautiful. But the work comes from somewhere else.
My condolences for your loss. I’m glad you have the gift of your exceptional writing skills to help you process it.
“Van Cleef” is such an interesting story. You set everything up one way at the start (as genre and tone go), then take a fantastic hard left turn. It’s a very satisfying gut punch. Did you have your ending in mind from the start, or did it grow out of the process? And were you "full steam ahead" on the idea of that ending, or did you have any trepidation? I really enjoyed it, but romance readers aren't generally big fans of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses everything.
It [the idea for the ending] came as I was approaching the end—I didn’t have it from the start. The whole story rests on Van Cleef treating his existence as a profession. Naps, debates, darts, all of it done in deadly earnest, as work. And as I neared the ending, I thought: if living is his job, how does a man like that resign? What would quitting look like for someone who has turned being alive into an occupation?
Once I saw the answer, I couldn’t unsee it. It followed from his own logic—there was no other way out for a man like him. If I’d chosen something gentler, it would have weakened the whole thing. Van Cleef isn’t an average man, least of all in how he perceives life. The ending had to honour that.
The humour, I should say, wasn’t planned at all. I didn’t set out to write comedy as a setup for the ending. It just happened. I only realised it was there when I reread the draft and laughed out loud—and then wondered if it was only funny to me. But I liked it, so I kept it. Looking back, I think that’s what makes the ending land. You spend the whole story amused by this absurd man and his “profession,” and then it turns. But I can’t claim I engineered that. I just recognised it once it was on the page, and trusted it.
Can you give us a little background on your submission-for-publication process on “Van Cleef”? We always recommend radical transparency on the subject of rejections here at Shoutout—we want to transform the thought of them into spine-stiffening positives. That said, immediate acceptance is certainly something to crow about…
My Submittable history is eye-watering—a long, faithful routine of rejections. So when I came across BULL Literary Magazine, I thought, well, let’s not break the habit. I sent “Van Cleef” there and nowhere else, fully expecting the usual.
Then the acceptance came, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. When the editor’s email arrived, I genuinely thought, for a moment, that it was spam—because why would a long, reliable streak of rejections break now? But no. BULL liked the piece. They liked my piece. I couldn’t believe it. I’m not sure I fully believed it for a while.
BULL Literary Magazine is such a singular publication. I’ve had the honor of receiving one of their template-exploding rejections, which, on its own is worth the cost of submission. I strongly recommend submit something else to them so you can, maybe, you know, experience the high that comes with that low :)
What can you tell us about the acceptance-to-publishing process with BULL?
I got the acceptance in January 2026. They pointed me to where I could upload the piece and make any final edits of my own beforehand, and told me it would be published in about four months, and that I’d be notified once it was live. And that’s exactly what happened—no surprises, no chasing. Before I knew it the four months had passed and the editor sent me the link, faithfully, just as promised. BULL did some light editing of their own, mostly converting my British spellings to American. Beyond that, the piece ran as it was.
Can you shoutout a fellow writer / story / book that you think the world needs to have its eyes on now?
I’ll be honest—I’m not a big reader, and I’ve made my peace with that. A handful of stories have never left me: Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Stephen King’s “Mrs Todd’s Shortcut” and “Survivor Type,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I read most of them at university, and they simply stayed.
But I don’t read for ideas, the way some writers do. There’s already so much going on in my own head that I don’t tend to go looking for more. My stories come from what I feel and see—my own perception of things, and how I relate to them. A feeling, a moment, an ordinary day seen slightly askew. That’s usually where they begin.
You have a new short story called “The Loan,” just published in The Waterdog Magazine. What can you tell us about it?
I’d rather not say too much about “The Loan.” It’s a story I’d like people to come to knowing as little as possible from me. It works best that way. I’ll only say it comes from a question I can’t seem to stop asking, usually late at night: the question of what all of this is for. That’s the soil it grew in. The rest, I’d like readers to discover for themselves [check “The Loan” out at the link above.]
Your website, Tales of the Hidden Hour, invites visitors into your work in a very deliberate, mood-setting way. What was the inspiration behind it, and what can you tell us about the experience of building it?
You’ll have noticed the site has an antique feel, and that’s very deliberate. I’ve always loved antique shops, especially in small towns. They take me somewhere I’ve never actually been—a place I couldn’t possibly have known, and yet it feels lived in, like stepping backwards into time itself. As if every antique shop is a doorway back to the very first one that ever existed. A book with a cracked spine, a first edition, something that might date back to the seventeenth century—each object a thread pulling further back than the last. Antique shops seem to whisper about everyone who owned these things before.
The name itself, Tales of the Hidden Hour, is literal. The hidden hour is when my ideas come—late at night, when the house is quiet and the day is put away. That’s when I do my thinking. Though there’s more hidden in the name than the hour, if you look at it long enough.
And perhaps that’s why Toth town became a home for people too, not just objects. Somewhere the things—and the people—who are gone still have a shelf. Still linger.
Thanks so much for your time and attention, Caroline! And for sharing your worlds with us. We look forward to your latest accepted-for-publication (whoo-hoo!) short story “The Bank.” Please let us know when Headcanon Magazine pulls the trigger on it so we can give it a Shoutout :)
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