Category: Writer Interview

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 43: Catherine McNamara on “Love Stories for Hectic People” (Oxfordshire: Reflex Press, 2021)

Catherine, Welcome back to my WRITERS CHAT series. Today we’re discussing Love Stories for Hectic People, a slim volume of thirty-three charged flash fictions which recently won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection (congratulations!)

Cover image of Love Stories for Hectic People

SG: Firstly, let’s discuss the title and cover. It seems that these stories are not just for hectic people, they are about hectic people though much of what is explored in this collection is reflected by the cover image of a woman in a yellow dress pausing in her reading with the sense that she is full of feeling.

CMN: To be honest this title came about for another collection that outgrew its intention and vibe. I knew with the very first story – ‘As Simple as Water’ written first and barely edited – that I would be addressing the many shapes of love, so that would involve an array of people immersed in different lives. So Love Stories for Hectic People very quickly glued itself to the story series, which was written over the course of six months, until I reached the final piece – ‘Love Is an Infinite Victory’ – when I knew it was complete.

The cover image came afterwards, once the book had been accepted by Reflex Press. Before the pandemic I was in Venice for an opening, where I met an old friend who is a painter in Florence. I told him about the book of short fiction I’d had accepted, and he said why don’t you have a look at some of my works? This image spoke to me from the start and I can’t say how happy I am with it.

SG: What a lovely story about obtaining the image – so full of artistic synchronicity!

I love your use of brackets to bring the reader into the other side of the narrative. In “As Simple As Water” we meet Vasilis K and Marj B in Athens train station after the moment when Marj has fainted. As a woman – a stranger – helps Marj, Vasilis stands apart, watching:

Vasilis who has been making love to Marj most of the night (except when she wept in a corner of the bed and he waited) wonders about the pelvic cavern of all women which is filled with jostling organs and squelching tubes and lengthy orifices like vivid botanical sections drawn into slithering life.

So much is captured here – the stretch of time, of physicality, of distance and the point in which Vasilis removes himself from Marj. Can you talk about how you capture the depths of character and narrative in these short tales?

CMN: It’s going to sound very crazy but when I am in the zone and writing cleanly, it’s almost as though I am hearing a voice dictating the scene in my head, and I have to get it down quickly, and then halt before it turns to jibberish. Half of the time I am trying to slow and clarify what comes to mind, and make sure I am being faithful to the tract of the story, with some sort of carrot dangling ahead. Maybe it is madness. But I prefer to think of it as magical composition. Almost musical. Of course the downside is that sometimes it is irrelevant and nonsensical, or doesn’t piece together, but for me, this sort of freestyle writing sometimes brings me to the brink of lucid swimming ideas directly from the subconscious, which can be surprising and powerful. I do think writing is very much a practice, so one needs to find out what works best to produce some sort of truth or an honest portrait of some aspect of humanity. The brilliance of flash fiction is that you have zero time to get to the point, so you have to know the core of your story from the outset – and deliver! It’s a great, risky form.

All of the above said, I know that with this story I wanted to include the reader in the events leading up to Marj’s dramatic fainting at the train station, through the lens of Vasilis’s recollection. I don’t think the use of bracketed, almost-overview inserts works for every piece of work but in this case it seemed to fit with the raconteur style of voice. I think it helps us feel Vasilis’s discomfort and detachment within the fluid rush of action as it occurs, showing how the lover with whom he had been intimate is now a collapsed woman on a metro station floor and, later, a patient in a hospital, away from whom he walks back into his own life.

I think that to capture any sort of depth or truth you have be the character and be wholly faithful to how this person might act and react – even if this means changing the course of the story or using a certain voice or language style. Flash is brilliant for the shifting and intensity that it both allows and demands.

SG: You mention risky and flash together and I think with this collection you do take risks and even as you say, in the way you experience the dictation of the story and you get it down without letting the rational critic emerge.

As with much of your writing, it is through the senses that we get to know the characters. “Genitalia” captures the lived experience of periods, the messiness of our organs and the desire – by some – to tidy it all up, and in doing so, make women neater.

I loved the recollection of the unnamed woman painting “a line of hieroglyphics …on the yellow wall” of a hotel and that by now “the piece of mortar she painted would be lying in a pile of rubble along the river. Where it gleams at night” and how, at the end of this story, by becoming pregnant, all is calm again.

Can you talk a about how many of the stories here explore the power of the female body?

CMN: I really wanted to celebrate female blood in this story – a celebration of our moon-guided, timeless cycles and our power to reproduce. For me, the guy is almost irrelevant, in that he is so poorly informed about the wonders of the female body, and he has been grafted onto this young woman’s wondrous existence. I wanted to show that he would learn from and be enriched by her. Men are sometimes a little repulsed by the force and power of our bodies, and how we have this intrinsic connection to the tides, and even the gods if you like. I wanted to take up that thread and show this woman as a wild modern goddess.

SG: Yes! Many of the stories use sensory memories – or the creation of these memories, in “Citrus”, for example – to connect the child-self with the adult-self in the way that power permeates experience. Here the narrator – suffering abuse – notes that “Everything is fury, everything is rivalry.”

In “Slaughter of the Innocents”, power and police abuse of it simmers dangerously, represented by the “insignias on their shirts”, “a stitched leather holster nursing a gun” which make the narrator realise that she hates her father more than she loves her own life.

Can you talk about this theme of power and control?

CMN: I have experienced something of the violence of men and how this can filter down as a refracted code through a family. It’s something I know I will write about more. Probably anyone who has ever lived through violence is always one step away from this terror. So I think it is something I listen for when I am fishing for ideas, or when people tell stories.

The other thing I find is that we see so much violence on-screen that we are anaesthetised, so I think that my job as a writer is to strip back domestic violence to its daily tension and core dynamic, more than an orchestrated, visual drama. I wanted to get inside of violence with words and make the reader respond in a visceral way, perhaps striking familiar cords, but certainly in a more subtle way than televised or cinematic violence.

SG: That story deftly captures the refracted code of familial violence.

Languages and travel – and the liminal spaces between understanding and comprehension – add to the sense of surreal (and humour) in these stories. Often bodies and minds experience love separately.

In “Tokyo Frieze” Tanja and Kurt “always spoke freely; he with his accent and she with hers. Perhaps because of the zigzag through languages they were emboldened when addressing each other’s eyes.” Later Tanja recalls when she was younger and “had felt porous, hyper-human, tied to a common energy or saturation. But now she knew she was confined within the body around her and went no further. Her history was a stream of dioramas like this.”

I thought your use of language and travel as a way to delve into aging and the body was interesting. What are your thoughts on this?

CMN: It’s so true and curious the way that bodies and minds experience love separately. I love this zone!

‘Tokyo Frieze’ is one of my favourite stories in the collection and was originally published in Rowan Pelling’s The Amorist magazine. My interest in language and the languages of love stems from the fact that I left Sydney at 21 and though I speak English a lot of the time, I have lived in countries where other languages are spoken, and have learnt French and Italian, and am now studying Greek. So the characters in my life have mostly been European or West African, and I am fascinated by accents and attitudes and words. Travel too, as well as living in a foreign context and feeling at home within it, also figure in my experience so these aspects have become reference points for my stories.

In this way, utilising language and travel to address aging and the body, has been a natural modus operandi, in that my reservoir of story material comes directly from these areas. As I grow older as a female, a mother, a lover, a writer, a traveller, it’s not so much about recounting experience, as using the emotions generated by certain experiences in order to give authenticity to the stories that come about.

SG: I love how you express that, Catherine.

Using emotions generated by certain experiences in order to give authenticity to the stories that come about.

In essence, writing from what you know into what you don’t know.

Let’s end with five fun questions.

  • Coffee or Tea? Coffee – espresso!
  • Sandals or runners? Sandals
  • Sparkling water or non-carbonated? Non-carbonated
  • What are you reading now? Gina Frangella – Burn Down the House
  • What are you writing now? Novel rewrite and some budding flash stories

CMN: Thank you for having me again Shauna!

SG: Thank you, Catherine, for the joy reading your collection brought me and for your generous answers in our Writers Chat. I wish you much continued success with the collection.

Photograph of Catherine MacNamara

Thanks to Catherine McNamara and Reflex Press for providing me with a copy of Love Stories for Hectic People.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 42: Paul Perry on “The Garden” (New Island: Dublin, 2021)

Paul, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about The Garden  (New Island: Dublin, 2021), your new novel which, in the words of Mia Gallagher is “vividly compelling.” I’d agree with Mia – and the critical praise that The Garden is receiving – it is a novel that compels you to keep reading and at the same time makes you pause and contemplate the land around us and how we treat it.  

Cover image of The Garden

SG: Can you tell us a little about the origins of the setting and the place of The Garden? In interviews you’ve referred to your own experience of working in Florida some years ago but I wonder if recent climate change and world events had any influence on the narrative at all?

PP: I lived in the states in the 1990s, and in Florida for 3 of those years. I was captivated by the place; its tropical beauty, the palm trees, the flowers, the rich and diverse landscape.  And the diversity of the people too – from Cuba, South and Central America, and all over the US and the world. And of course, the never-ending sunshine. I was really stimulated by the place – it felt almost hyper-real to me; and the vibrancy and the literature too from the Caribbean impressed me. You know it’s such a contrast to the dark and the rain-sodden streets I grew up on in Dublin. Florida to me felt like life on the edge, in many different, wonderful, and dangerous ways. It’s an exciting place. I guess that all came together in the novel, The Garden; and as you say the environmental crises that the everglades in particular face was in mind; that this place, a sanctuary for birds, reptiles, and endangered species was under threat seemed to be a suitable arena for the human drama that enfolds in the novel.

SG: To this reader it really felt like the perfect arena for the drama in The Garden. The novel moves at a pace but through the Irish narrator Swallow, also provides introspection. What struck me most about the novel is the atmosphere – at once foreboding and idyllic – that you create and how we’re brought into this. For example, when we’re with Swallow as he drinks his bitter coffee in the morning, we really feel we’re there with him:

Waking the senses. First the sounds of birds and men shuffling. The smell of earth, and the greenness starting to take back, or the swamp beneath us trying to reclaim what belonged to it – without human interference, all elemental.  

It seems you have taken the advice of your creative writing mentor Lester Goran and gone for (at least) one beautiful phrase per page. Can you speak a little about your use of language and description?

PP: I’m a writer – in prose – who does not like long winded description or exposition. I don’t like novels that seem too long, and are full of filler, or writers who spell out what is at stake or say, this is the plot. I aim for a purposeful narrative with pace, and menace that allows for the left-field, and the meaningful digressionary moment or scene; so many novels I read have the most artificial dialogue like the two characters talking with one another are actually listening to each other. That’s not my experience. I like also the short novel. And I like writing to get to the point without any puff. That being said – I also aspire to balances, cadenced sentence where the rhythm of the language is honoured, and there is a control of tone.  These things are very important to me as a writer and a reader. In terms of description, I like Mark Doty’s definition of description as being encoded desire. My background in poetry means that I rely on motif, image, and metaphor in my prose, or that I go to them at least – in subliminal, subtextual fashion, so that you are creating grooves, and patterns in the reader’s mind, so that one phrase – however inconsequentially sounding can detonate something impactful in the reader’s mind.

SG: I love how you put that, creating grooves and patterns. Mark Doty has some really interesting things to say about description. I love his book The Art of Description.

The Garden could be described as a fable, and the journey the characters are on echoes the journey of ‘the ghost’ the orchid at the centre of this tale; they are precious, illegal, homeless and all struggle with identity – many of them, including Swallow, try to find themselves in the power the Garden seems to offer, escaping from memories. As he says swinging in the hammock, “I was seeking answers but all I had was starlight.”  Others, such as the visually blind (but all seeing) Harper, and his marking of the map (“circling with the pencil, spiralling inwards”) know the real perils. Can you talk about the fable and, at times, the moral element to the narrative?

PP: It’s not something I planned or set out to do; the fable like quality of the novel emerged as I was writing; and in terms of a moral element, yes one could read the novel as a warning and such, but if you look at the characters’ lives and the messy relationships between them, I think it’s fair to say that the moral code of the novel is complex. If someone wants to read a moral into the novel, I say, be my guest; but there’s probably different and contradictory ways to read the novel; and the moral code of its characters is complicated. Certainly, I think when you write a novel, you want it to be more than just a yarn. For a novel to last or linger in the memory, or for it provoke questions in the reader’s mind, I think there does have to a kind of sub-soil of searching about all sorts of moral questions. So writing it, I thought about Camus – and his stranger – justice divine and civil, and I thought again about Gatsby and what he devoted his life to, and the small scenes where a whole moral world was revealed. 

SG: I’m nodding at this – the connections with Camus and Fitzgerald – how “small” scenes reveal a whole moral and complex world.

The men who live in the barracks in the Garden co-exist with brotherly love infused with marine/army rules. This comes from both Swallow’s influence as an ex-marine as Blanchard’s right-hand man and from the men’s invisible place in the official world. It can be seen in the friendship – and rivalry – between Swallow and Romeo who appears with a “muted swagger” and “looked as if he didn’t know how to shake the shadow of a malaise”. Yet it’s also evident in those outside of the Garden, looking for financial gain from those inside (drug money, the ghost orchid). Their names – such as Black Fox, Catfish – tie them  to ancestry, land and deeds.

Did the theme of male friendship and rivalry emerge as story developed or was this a theme that you began with?

PP: Well, the whole writing of the novel was a exploration in the dark – that’s what my subconscious came up with after I had written in a kind of fever dream; so yes, male friendship and rivalry is important to me, but I did not set out to write about those themes; I followed the story, thoughts and feelings of Swallow; it’s his story after all, but male friendship and rivalry does, as it happens, interest me; in a way, how could it not; shifting allegiances, friendship, brotherly love all of these things as a boy, and a man I have grappled with, embraced, and otherwise, but again that’s not to say the novel is a didactic playground to explore in a scientific way; human impulses, male or otherwise, are full of the irrational, the impulsive, and the passionate. And the novels is such an elastic form it allows you to unpack these things, but that’s got nothing to do with the writing of a story; the story is what matters, not its themes when one comes to write. As ee cummings wrote, ‘since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things.’ You see, I even contradict myself. 

SG: How fascinating to learn that the whole writing of the novel was an exploration in the dark!

Moving on to another theme that interested me as I read and, like masculinity, appeared like a shiny thread. Swallow is aware of his privilege as a white male and often muses about this – including questioning Meribel about how she stays with a racist like Blanchard. She tells him that he (Blanchard) thinks her “white”. Swallow’s privilege is also seen through Lola’s plight as a precarious worker/lover/female. Towards the end of The Garden Swallow realises “The desperate lengths people will go to for beauty”.

These parallel threads seemed very current and I wondered, given that in many ways The Garden is timeless, if race and gender formed part of the wider commentary on the structures of society and power, or if they emerged through the characterisation? 

PP: Again, I wasn’t writing a novel to make a wider commentary on anything. There are better ways to do that, I think. Critics, and reviewers can put these kind of labels on the book, and so be it, but I’d like to get a way from the kind of reading of the novel, this novel, as a commentary, or vehicle for anything other than what it in itself – a story. If a writer sets out with a message it will damage the writing and the book. So, I think it would almost be disingenuous of me to say yes, this novel is a commentary on whatever. It is, of course, or could be seen as such, but I also think the novel is so various in contemporary letters and allows a writer so much freedom – that I welcome different readings of the novel, but I am hesitant to even suggest what themes readers should look for; race and gender are centrally central to how the story unfolds, but I also think of course they are – when Swallow looks around him this is what he sees. And it’s a brutally unequal, unfair world he lives in.

SG: Isn’t it wonderful how such depth of themes emerge when you are faithful to the characters and the story?

Nature as a character is the main driver of story and back story. I am thinking here of Swallow’s back story about his brother and of Lola’s brother who drowned. It feels that the more the characters try to get back what was taken from them (identity, agency, power), the more they fight for and with each other (for the illusion of profit and gain), and the more natural disasters such as dreadful hurricanes happen. As nature is disrupted, people become more vicious. Nature, like God, is “wrathful”.

Three events spring to mind as examples of the beauty of connection turning into the ugliness of pain – the beach scene with Romeo, one of the visits to the swap where a gator makes itself known and one of the final scenes involving Swallow and another man’s ears.

“Each season,” Swallow comments, “I wondered what it was we were doing…Sometimes I wondered whose dream I was in.” Later he says “Part of me thought I was going out of my mind, as if we were existing on some foreign orb, living out the game-time of another species, playing our roles badly, with violent and careless glee.”

It seems as if the knowledge of how land and people are all connected is almost within reach of Swallow’s consciousness but then it slips away. In the swamp he says, “Something in my physical being knew this was a trespass of sorts.”

What are your thoughts on this?  

PP: I think Swallow is struggling with the reality which has manifested itself about him; he’s wondering like a lot of people how he got to where he’s at. He’s displaced, confused, and paralysed to a certain extent. I like your reading of the novel above, and I agree with it; I’ve dramatised those tensions. [Thank you!] I think the novel is interested in that notion of trespass – literal and otherwise; what transgression has been committed, and what of it. Does it keep the reader wanting to know what happens next. Much of my efforts in writing are in the compositional domain however; it’s like make the thing first, and then see what it means, if it means anything. It goes back to the writer writing without full knowledge; the writing is on a journey too, if they knew what message and themes they wanted to explore exactly, the game would be up. Better to work in ignorance, or partial ignorance; I feel now that the book is published that my guess is a good as yours. There’s a notion in lit crit of Intentional fallacy, a term used to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it. I kind of agree with this.

SG: Oh we could get into a whole Writers Chat about intentionality and purpose – and we could also talk about the death of the author (Barthes) and what the reader brings/re-writes.

I totally agree with what you say about the writer writing – make the thing first, then see what you’ve made. In a way, the writers job is not to make the meaning, it’s to allow the meaning to emerge.

On a personal note, I have to say I really connected with Swallow as both a character and narrator. Besides wanting to have a whole discussion on his name and back story, I’d love to see what happens next to the Garden. Will there be a follow on book or do you think you’ll return to the character of Swallow in another form or genre?

PP: I’m working on a new novel – but I’m loathe to get into it; I’m a little superstitious about talking or writing about something I’m writing; rather work in silence, in order not to break the spell.

SG: I totally understand that – I’m sure what emerges will emerge – and be as intriguing and magical as The Garden.

We’ll end this Writers Chat, Paul, with some short questions:

  • Mountains or beach? Beach
  • Swamp or bog? Swamp
  • Coffee or tea? Both
  • What flowers are in your garden now (if you have one!)? I’m working on some bamboo
  • Oh! Bamboo! I can hear it in the wind! Lastly, what are you reading now? Damon Galgut’s The Promise

SG: Thank you for your deep engagement with our Writers Chat, Paul and I wish you continued success with The Garden.

Photograph of Paul Perry (Courtesy of the author)

Paul Perry is an award-winning poet and novelist. He has published several collections of poetry, most recently Blindsight (above / ground press, 2020). He also co-authored four international bestselling novels as Karen Perry, including The Innocent Sleep with Penguin Random House. He directs the Creative Writing Programme at University College Dublin. The Garden is his debut novel as Paul Perry.

Thanks to New Island and Peter O’Connell Media for providing an advance copy of The Garden.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 41: Philip Ó Ceallaigh on “Trouble” (Stinging Fly: Dublin, 2021)

You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about Trouble (Stinging Fly: Dublin, 2021), your new short story collection which, in John Banville’s words, shows you as “a wonderful writer…a master in full control of his material.” I have to agree – the prose is tight and illuminating, the stories gritty and surreal.

I

SG: Let’s start with the form of the short story. You were awarded the Rooney Prize in 2006 for Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. In an interview with the Irish Times you said “…all life is material you just don’t always know when it’s happening what you want to write about.” Tell me what draws you to and keeps you with the form of the short story – is it easier to write direct from life?

POC: I’m not sure what you mean by “direct from life”. But I’ve found that short narratives suit my way of writing, which is intuitive in the first draft, not guided by any great conception of what I’m doing in terms of ideas or where I’m going. I may be guided by an image or a mood or a situation. Anything that gets me writing the next line. After I have a draft, then I’ll start to see what I’m about. This resembles life a bit, in that we generally don’t know what’s happening to us while it’s happening, because we’re usually busy reacting to what’s thrown at us. Maybe later we figure things out and apply retrospective meaning. We’re creatures that feel things, and we create narrative sense as a way of dealing with what befalls us. So I’m guessing that what appeals to some readers in my stories – a sense of strangeness, disorientation, things happening – is what appeals to me in the writing, that nothing’s quite fixed or settled. And yet the written story needs to interesting enough, as a problem, that it remains afterwards, like a puzzle. At least this is how I experience films and stories that have some depth. I prefer not to feel that I’m being forced by forced by the director or author to feel something. You know, when it’s really blatant in a film, and the music tells you, feel sad now. If something is well put together you don’t have to resort to such cues, and the process isn’t finished when you leave the cinema or close the book. The story resembles something you take with you and needs to be absorbed, digested. Like an experience from real life.

SG: I love that you’re at ease with nothing’s fixed or settled as you write, as in life, and that you can still wrestle with the form – once the draft is down. And does writing in the short form tie in with your work as a translator (I’m thinking, here of For Two Thousand Years)?

POC: No. Except that it involves sentences, one at a time, trying to find the most elegant and concise rendering in one language of what appears in another.

SG: As a Part B to this question – There were a number of stories (“My Life in the Movies” and “My life in the City”) in which the same characters and places appear. I wondered if these could be the beginnings or middles of a novel – are you interested in the long form, at all?

POC: Of course I am, as an experiment, a challenge. I don’t feel limited in what I can do in the short form, but I have been curious to know what I can do, what happens if I push myself and try things I’m not immediately inclined to do. So I’ve written a couple of novels, but the experiment has not been successful, and it’s time consuming so it’s not an experiment that tempts me much now. I think that in a longer narrative you can’t – or I can’t – write at that unconscious level that excites me and makes the process worthwhile. If I have to plot things out I get bored and frustrated. Yes, My Life in the Movies and My Life in the City are cut from a novel-length story that I struggled with for years, and in the end rebelled against. Not only did I chop it to pieces, I discarded the profound conclusions the central character reached at the end! In the new version I leave him scratching his head, confounded by his own emotional and intellectual shortcomings. Which seems right. Since that’s what happened to the author.

SG: You have me smiling here. Maybe we’re all still confounded. What struck me most about Trouble, a collection of 13 stories, is the atmosphere that you create. It could be called voice but I think it’s more than just the writer’s voice. It feels like something more fundamental within the stories – a tone of deep yearning, for example in “Smoke”, that is reflected in the tautness of your prose, it pushes against the edges of the readers’ emotions. Can you comment on this?

POC: I don’t know about the yearning but I can talk about the tautness. It’s a matter of technique and it’s what should distinguish a page of a short story from that of a novel. A novel can afford to be loose. You can’t have a page or a paragraph of a short story that’s superfluous or where not much is happening. The short story should ask more of the reader’s attention, but it can only do this if it rewards the increased attention.

SG: Thank you for that precise distinction, one which is not always easy to articulate. Many of your narrators are philosophical and offer the reader wonderful witty asides. Take the narrator in the title story “Trouble”. He tells us that Garrity’s problem with sleep “had also turned him into a reader and provoked tremendous mid-life bouts of thoughtfulness”. “Relaxing into money is an art. It takes centuries to learn.”

In the poignant and gritty “London” we learn that “When his first child was born and he had held him in his arms he had learned what his own strength was for. The lesson was that strength existed to protect the defenceless. It was a simple trick nature played on the strong…”

In “The Book of Love” Sol tells us to “stop trying to nail happiness!”

Was this great mix of wit and philosophy intentional as part of the narrative drive or did it come from the characterisation?

POC: The tendency to get what you call philosophical. I have to watch it, to reign it in. It’s a matter of balance, you don’t want to load a narrative with meaning. There’s a natural weight that can be borne, that comes off as natural, as flowing from the action and the character.

SG: And these stories do have the balance you speak of. Dislocation, disconnection, disinterest come into many of the stories – movement from place to place, relationship to relationship, a sense that the narrators are often spectators in their own lives, on the edge of place and self. At times they appear to be actually living the life of others or not feeling at all, supressing everything. People all, of course, in search for connections.

In “The Island” the narrator, escaping his perceived reality, encounters an ever-growing band of copulating and arousing monkeys with their own social strata, realises that “every creature is tortured in its dreams, the lowest and the highest, always running, pursued by phantoms, even when stretched out unconscious on the ground…all my heavy flesh wished for was to wish for nothing, to lie there, kissed by nothingness.”

In “Graceland” the narrator, feeling his almost-ex-partner is “using” their child to get at him, “hushed the violence. He whispered to it and caressed it like you would a cat to gain its trust then he gripped the loose skin of the nape and removed it squirming from the room. No, nothing unpleasant was going to happen.”

Was this a theme that emerged as you put the collection together?

POC: Anything you can call a theme emerges after the writing. But the stories are more interesting gathered together, maybe less perplexing. The collection isn’t something that was plotted out in advance. It was one story at a time. But it’s the same mind coming at the same problems, obsessions, from different angles, different styles.

SG: Much of the writing is cinematic – take the opening of “My Life in the Movies” – “Opening scene: a bar in the old town”, which itself is about a man who makes movies and spends much of his time in a bar where

Around us, the new species of male that was invading the planet – skinny, blow-dried, finicky about attire and grooming. Aliens, hunched into the screens of laptops and hand-held devices, attentive as lovers, faces palely illumined in the hypnotic masturbatory glow.

In “My life in the City”, our narrator is often “quietly angry” and is finally “glad that the terrible dream city was not real, that I did not have to undergo its trials. My sole regret was I had lost the reels of film I had never shot.”

“The Book of Love” opens:

I was staring out through the plate-glass restaurant window at pensioners bearing cargoes of purchases and a young thug swearing into his phone, and a millionaire was telling me about the importance of cunnilingus.

Can you talk a little about the link between cinema and writing – if you think there is one.

POC: About ten years ago a Romanian director talked me into writing a screenplay. It was a terrible experience. This director knew nothing about telling stories and I knew nothing about writing screenplays. But I felt she was listening to my ideas and I could work with her. Except that she was a liar and the relationship deteriorated and she went on to make a crappy film. The mad thing is that making a film involves a lot of money and people and work, even if the product is a failure, or nonsense. I earned a lot of money from this shameful episode, relative to what I’ve earned for any of my books. It was a strange experience for me on another level too, because I think of storytelling as a way to make sense of experience. Here I was in a realm where the writing got garbled through the miscommunication between me and the director, her misreading of what I’d written. I envisaged the story as a comedy with a smart, thoughtful ending. The director made it serious, serious, serious – no relief, no contrast. Four top-class actors, they couldn’t save it. Lighting, editing, music, special effects – in vain. It was still crap. I didn’t attend the premiere, like Vali in the story; I slunk into a cinema in the afternoon and slunk out again. Writing for the cinema is not writing for the page and much depends on the relationship with the director. Even then, you have to be detached about the result. It doesn’t belong to you. I’ll be very happy if I can sell the rights of any of my stories for film. But wary of getting involved in screenwriting. Anyway, I got to write my story about Vali, who bumbles his way through these things as cluelessly as I did.

SG: It sounds like all this miscommunication was such a pity but as you say, a story came from this experience. Changing direction now, I was particularly moved and shocked by the genius story “First Love”. It is a semi-fictionalised rewriting of the diary of Felix Landau (1910 – 1983), recounting some activities as Judengeneral in 1941/2. “First Love” came as a shock – the title like a bitter taste as you read the disturbingly convincing narrator express so eloquently how love sick he is at the same time as he crisply recalls duties performed. In July he writes:

A precarious light, a mood, a few tinkling notes at the end of a melody. Sky oozing colour like those Bosnian cakes drip syrup. For the personal to assume such proportions now, when the world is being remade – madness….Reds didn’t know what hit them. Salvaged what we needed from what they left behind as the Jews scurried about, cleaning up. I have so many thoughts, impressions, but it is almost midnight and they’re all for Trude. I speak to her in my head, constantly. 

He also recounts his frustrations of not being immersed in combat: “I desire combat, end up shooting unarmed people. 23, including two women” and follows a detailed description of the shooting with this reflection: “It was mid-morning, I was exhausted but the usual administrative work followed.” 

“First Love” also stands out as being so different in style (diary entries) and context from the stories either side of it. As I read the stories in the order in which they’re presented, this came to me like a palate cleansing story. How did you decide on the placement of it in the collection?

POC: It’s a disruptive story so I wanted it somewhere in the middle. I have noticed in the past that what some readers dislike about some of my stories is that the narrators are strange or nasty or both. And some readers draw back from this challenge, because they think that they’re being asked to be complicit in the thoughts and acts of the narrator. And I suppose you inevitable identify with a first-person narrator or a central character. I like this kind of tension in a story, that such demands are made. We aren’t all nice all the time and fiction gives us a way of facing this complexity. So maybe there’s some slyness in the introduction of this narrator in the book, because the things he does are so categorically, criminally terrible, and I didn’t make them up. They’re a matter of historical fact. In a way, it allowed me to declare something about my technique for those who fail to get it. And to put the other characters in the book in some kind of perspective, morally.

SG: Oh that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of how acceptable some of the behaviour/attitudes of other characters felt after this story. Very clever placement. The body and all its functions and the desire to escape its limitations and entrapments is to the fore in this collection.

In “The Book of Love” Sol, a “scientific wonder,” a man with “an animal head”, pays women to let him pleasure them, has “delicate hands for such a short, heavy man” but “he carried his bulk gracefully”. The body echoes our problems, “like memories,” and cars “shimmered and wobbled in the heat”, the same cars that allow us to actively enter the dream state.

Can you talk about the body – human, animal, mechanical, and the body of story – and how it both serves to contain and also offers escape.

POC: That’s what Leonard Cohen asked God, and God said unto Leonard:

He said I locked you in this body

I meant it as a kind of trial

You can use it for a weapon

Or to make some woman smile

Can’t beat that.

SG: Ha! You can’t beat that, not Leonard! So, we’ll end this Writers Chat, Philip, with some short questions:

  • City or Countryside?  Alternating.
  • Sounds like the best sort of life. And to drink? Carafe of red wine or bottle of beer?  Yes, but beer before wine.
  • Specific order! Music or silence when you write, and, if music, what type?  I often kick-start the writing with a song, and then listen to the same song each time I start a new writing session. But I’ll turn off the music once I get going, there’s a point at which it’s distracting. Nearly always something lyric-heavy. For example, for Island it was Dylan’s Thunder on the Mountain.
  • Yes, I can relate to the kick-starting and returning back to that point again. So, what are you reading now? Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. One of the most important books of the 20th century. I don’t know why we weren’t given it to read at school. Instead of Shakespeare.
  • Yes to Solzhenitsyn. He’s someone I need to return to. All the Russians. What are you writing now? A story about an academic, a historian of religion, whose career goes into a tailspin when it transpires that he transpires that he’s written somewhere, in a social media discussion, of Greta Thunberg: “The kid’s retarded!”

Wow. I can see why his career is in a tailspin, he sounds like he’d fit in with some of the characters in Trouble. So, thanks, Philip for taking part and engaging with this Writers Chat session. I want to go back to Trouble and re-read it now! Wishing you much further success with the collection.

Order Trouble directly from The Stinging Fly.

Thank you to Declan Meade, The Stinging Fly and Peter O’Connell Media for the advance copy of Trouble.