I’VE been asked if I shape my material to serve political purposes, and the answer is I hope I never do. To quote the greatest short story writer of all time, Anton Chekhov: The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them. I don’t read fiction to be told what to think. Political purposes are for politicians, activists, the media.

I write stories in order to think, because it makes me focus on the questions and the contradictions; and I explore the topic of the man-made climate emergency because it is staring me in the face. I don’t know the answers any more than readers do, but we’ll never find any answers if we don’t ask more questions.

The stories spring from real events in my life. The Groundsman’s Story in my latest collection, Fire-Ready, is a good example.

Early one morning during the first Covid lockdown, April 2020, I went for my solitary once-a-day exercise in the grounds of a nearby college. I went early to avoid the crowd – the rolling lawns, lakeside walk and woods made it popular.

A groundsman was planting out petunias and he called “hello!” so I stopped for a distanced chat. Well, more of a tirade, really, about “this bloody epidemic.” His gardeners had been furloughed so he had to do all their work himself; hundreds of people were exercising there every day, dropping litter and blocking the lane with their cars; he was working on trapping the plague of moles in the lawn and the squirrels destroying his saplings, and had to get up at 5.30 every morning to clear the traps before the first runners came in at 7.

His perspective on Covid stuck in my mind. It took a long time (two years) for it to surface as a short story. That’s how it works. A nugget of experience lurks and slowly coalesces with quite different scraps of material; in this case, a slower, more puzzled character, based on a farmer I know, plus an idea about the comfort in keeping calm and carrying on no matter what. Eventually, it morphs into fiction.

The Groundsman’s Story is definitely fiction. I’ve engineered suspense by opening with a mystery, heightened the drama with a threat of arson from a squirrel-loving runner, and turned the college into a school with a comically incompetent head. But the core of the story is true.

And that’s the case with most of the stories in Fire-Ready. If there isn’t a grain of my own experience in it, a story rarely turns out well. In fact it’s the fragment of undigested life niggling at me, that makes the story happen. I’m not claiming to produce pearls, but as I understand it, my experience is very like an oyster’s.

So in Fire-Ready, the title story is set on my sister Helen’s smallholding in South Australia, and the heart-breaking incident with the injured horse happened to her. After she told me, I had to write it. But through multiple unsatisfying drafts, the heft of the story shifted, from purely shocking and sad (horse death) to shoots of hope (potential friendship with neighbour). Because a story that’s purely sad has no energy, no conflict, no questions.

Tragically, Helen’s place burned down very recently, in a bushfire on January 18. Although they were fire-ready, the fire moved too fast for them. Thankfully neither she nor her partner were hurt, and crowds of friends and neighbours are now helping to clear the debris. There may be another story in it.

The final story in the collection, The Night Before, explores a climate activist’s moral dilemma, and I’m happy to say readers’ reactions have ranged from describing the protagonist as “wicked,” to sorrowful admiration for her courage. I myself veer painfully between those two positions. A good short story draws the writer and the reader into another person’s experience; it never tells you what to think – it provokes questions. And hopefully, along the way, it entertains.

Fire-Ready by Jane Rogers is published by Comma Press. Five stories from the collection will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, March 2-6, at 22.45 each day.