Short Stories and Sleaziness: A Conversation with Wendy Erskine

2 Feb

“I remain, stylistically, a stick of seaside rock with HUMANE and SLEAZY running through it, top to bottom.”

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit more about the experience of publishing your second short story collection? Did the process differ from your debut collection?

With my debut collection, I got an email from Declan Meade of The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland, after he had read one of my stories, to say that he was interested in possibly publishing a collection. I knew that he had published the first books of so many great writers like Kevin Barry, and so I knew this was a very big deal. I immediately poured myself a big drink and put on Success by Iggy Pop. Well no I didn’t. But I did start to write a story a month for about a year and a half. I worked really hard. And then for the second collection, the process was more or less the same. I wrote, roughly, a 6000-word story every six weeks or so. It’s a really thrilling thing, working with an editor who understands what you are trying to do, and being on a high each time a story is finished and seems to work. Both of the collections were published outside Ireland by Picador. That was great.

Do you have any writing or reading rituals? And have these changed at all as you develop your style?

Rituals might be too elevated an expression for the ways I like to read. I’ll sometimes read the ending of a novel first. I often skip descriptions of flora and fauna. I can’t be bothered a lot of the time with that. Sometimes I get really obsessed with a peripheral character and only read the sections that involve them. I don’t read a short story collection in order. I just start wherever I fancy. You buy the book, you can do what you want. I always have a couple of books on the go at the same time, and I never persevere if I’m not enjoying it. Life is too short.

In terms of writing rituals, I don’t have many. I usually write a very long first draft – maybe 18,000 words for a 6,000-word story. I write with no restrictions and a sense of excitement because I don’t know the direction in which things are going to move. I’m getting to know characters and really, the whole enterprise is just surprising and, there’s no other word for it - fun. After that, I need to get a little more focused. I read back what I’ve written and try to discern what is or isn’t interesting, who or what is worth pursuing. Nothing much has ever changed in relation to this. But then I don’t think my style has ever undergone any radical transformations over time. I remain, stylistically, a stick of seaside rock with HUMANE and SLEAZY running through it, top to bottom.

There are a lot of connotations and ideas around short stories and the potential difficulties around creating a narrative in a shorter form. Could you talk about how you approach short stories and whether you find them a more flexible and experimental format?

The old short story arcana! I initially was put off stories because of the ways that people talked about them, the discourse if you will. All that stuff about perfect, pristine, polished writing, not a work out of place. It all sounded so restrictive and technical. The creation of Faberge eggs or some kind of filigree jewellery. And all the rules! Don’t introduce a character late on in the story. Don’t have a late shift of perspective. Have a killer first paragraph. And so on and so on. Of course you can do what you want, and if you work with a kind of faithfulness to character and the story itself, you can do what you want. I’ve said loads of times that short stories are essentially our communicative currency in everyday life. They’re not some rarefied form. You meet someone for a drink or a coffee and you swap short stories. That said, they can also be, as you say, very flexible and experimental. In terms of temporal structures, you can span thirty seconds or three hundred years. You can do things that might be difficult to sustain over the course of a novel.

In a similar vein, do you find that the short story form allows for a sense of open-endedness, as the focus and value of a short story is rarely a conclusive and unambiguous resolution?

One of the things when talking about a novel or a story is that whatever position I take, in terms of say, endings, it is also fair to say that the exact diametrical position is also true if I look at another novel or short story. I sometimes come out with these very splashy and definite pronouncements about this and that, but I am also aware that they are at best only about three-quarters true. That said, yes I do think that the short story form allows for a sense of open-endedness. I don’t really like money-shot endings, where the whole point of the story resides in the final paragraph, like the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet or the punchline of a joke. I do like the idea that the reader is co-opted into continuing the narrative by projecting into future time.

Having said that, are there any novels that you think have particularly satisfying endings? And what does that idea of a gratifying ending mean to you?

The idea of a gratifying ending is one that is a satisfying reading experience within the context of the story. And so it just depends. A book like Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan, about Sonia, a racehorse trainer, well for me the point of that book is in the experience of reading of it, the accretion of scenes, and so the ending is absolutely neither here nor there. In something like In the Dark by Anamaria Crowe Serrano there is a surprise that I never anticipated in the ending, I love the coda ending of The Age of Innocence, one of those shifts forward in time that produces a perspective that makes this reader re-evaluate quite substantially their ideas of character. And then say, David Keenan, built into a book like Monument Maker are multiple endings and beginnings. So yeah, I’m flexible on endings. And meanings.

Why do you think short stories are often underrated and disregarded by the big literary prizes? Do you think this opinion may change in the future?

Well, we often hear that we are on the brink of a short story renaissance. How true that is I do not know. I think it has been said over the decades with some regularity. I suppose shorter books have been getting more appreciation recently, like Assembly or Small Things Like These. I sometimes think the protean quality of short story collections, or many of them, makes them hard for people to get their heads around. You know, there’s maybe twenty central characters, if you look across the whole book, and potentially a massive range of ideas or concerns. That said, The Edge Hill Prize for the best UK or Irish collection is a brilliant prize. And then there is the Cork International Short Story Festival which is wonderful. I heard Ron Rash reading there, and it was one of the single best things I have ever heard in my life.

How do you approach the creation of your characters?

I wait for them to appear and then I need to take time to get to know them. I try not to make them cyphers or vehicles for ideas. They need to be people and not those things,

How do you feel about commentators bringing up the point that your stories are all based in Belfast and suggesting that this may be in some way a limitation?

I find it rather odd. It suggests certain ideas about people and places that I find pretty strange. I don’t write local colour literature and so therefore, without getting too pompous, I would hope that the alienation, loneliness, desperation, anger, aspiration, hope, love, joy, delusion, stoicism, hatred, regret depicted is not exclusive to a few Belfast streets.

How much would you agree that your writing is concerned with the complexity of the day-to-day lives of ‘ordinary’ people and the coexistence of joy and desperation in life? And are there any other themes that you are inclined to explore in your writing?

I would agree that for sure, I deal with the co-existence of joy and desperation. I deal with delusion and reality, with loneliness and connection, loss and abuse, inescapability and change. I do not however write about ‘ordinary’ people. What makes these people ordinary? The whole point is that, on looking, everyone is quite extraordinary. Dance Move has also been described as presenting ‘unassuming lives.’ In Dance Move there’s multiple killings, suicide, sectarian murder squads, imprisonment, addiction, coercion, child sexual exploitation, dangerous political cults, female self-pleasure in tanning salons and so on. If that is your idea of unassuming lives, well, I can only marvel at the world in which you must live, pal.

(The stories are also funny.)

Finally, do you judge a book by its cover?

I love a nice cover but some of my favourite books have awful ones.

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