Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine’s debut short story collection, was released in September 2018, published by The Stinging Fly Press, and has been met with great enthusiasm and acclamation. I spoke to her a few days after it launched in Belfast about her processes and experiences.

Susanna Galbraith: Sweet Home has received a lot of attention and affection recently. At its Belfast launch the American Bar was bursting at the seams. How are you finding the spotlight?

Wendy Erskine: I’m liking it. I’m joking when I say I was a recluse, but I certainly spent a lot of time at home working on the book. But it’s really thrilling if people enjoy it, and the American Bar was really exciting because so many people were prepared to come out to celebrate it. I said in the speech it felt like my wedding, and it did totally because there were just so many people out from all walks of life. It’s so bizarre to see something I’ve worked on as a physical entity and to see people walking around with the book, it still really shocks me. It’s like looking in a second-hand shop and seeing your own jumper or whatever in the window, its odd and very disconcerting, but it’s great at the same time.

SG: Can you firstly tell me a little bit about how the book came about and the decisions involved in its coming into being? Did you know it would be this book of short stories with these characters when you set out?

WE: Well I suppose no not really, because I was writing stories one at a time and when I started off writing story one I had no idea about story two never mind story ten. I went on the Stinging Fly six-month fiction workshop, and as a result I got one story published in the Stinging Fly magazine (which would have been May 2016). That was actually the first story that was in the collection, “To All Their Dues.” And as a result of that Declan Meade of the Stinging Fly contacted me and said he enjoyed the story and put forward the possibility of working on a collection. That was so exciting and quite incredible, and I knew then that this was my chance, and I was going to need to start working really hard. I reckoned I could write about one story a month or so, about 6000 words, so I did that for about a year, just sending Declan a story every month. I knew that they were all going to be set in and around a few streets, quite geographically circumscribed. I wrote more stories than are in the book, maybe about sixteen. There were about five or six that I just didn’t include for various reasons, but they all would have been set around the same place as well.

SG: I’d like to talk about the title, “Sweet Home.” Home is such a complicated bitter-sweet concept, denoting the original shelter of a house, and the family, but also a geographical place that’s shared with others who might remain strangers, and so often we aren’t aware of home until we’re separated from it, which gives it a sort of melancholy. It has deep private meanings, but there are also the cultural stereotypes of ‘the home’. I wanted to ask you about what home meant for you when you were writing these stories, and what sort of connotations you wanted to knit into the collection?

WE: Obviously there would have been different titles that would have been possible for this. But, just in terms of the actual physical space of the home you mentioned there, whenever I was thinking about the book I was thinking about the number of times that doors were really significant, the whole idea of people standing at doors, deciding whether or not to gain entrance, or locking people out of their houses, falling into their house, drunk. It just seemed to be that doors as a portal to the home cropped up over and over again. And I suppose I was also just interested in the kind of minutiae of people’s homes, the idea that homes have their own little rules and regulations, their own little governors. I find all that really interesting. Also the question of what does it mean for a place to be your home, what does it mean for a place like Belfast to be your home, what does that amount to? It might be just a small number of streets. And then I was thinking about home in a bigger way, in terms of Northern Ireland or the North of Ireland or whatever you want to call it, what does that mean for people in terms of a home. So I thought for a title it would probably be a useful one because it had a microcosm to macrocosm mix, levels of ways it could be considered. And with “Sweet Home” I did think about “Sweet Home Alabama” as something people would think of. I just find that an interesting place and that song an interesting song, taken in its totality presenting both good and bad about a place, and Northern Ireland or North of Ireland was a fairly similar sort of thing.

SG: These stories of course unfold in a recognisable locality of East Belfast.  Is this your home?

WE: Yeah, East Belfast is my home. And I didn’t really want to do any writing just at this stage that involved me doing too much research, so it was quite easy for me to deal with a place that I’m intimately familiar with.

SG: Did you think about your prospective readers as people who knew East Belfast or did you write thinking about how someone could read this knowing nothing about this world where your characters operate? Did this matter?

WE: I suppose in one respect I was writing thinking people from East Belfast will read this. Therefore, if I get this wrong, if I say this bus goes here when It doesn’t, people will know. So on a purely practical level, for the kind of procedural aspects like how you get from one place to another and that kind of thing, yes, I felt aware that people from East Belfast would read it. And also with expressions and so on. But I was also aware, not just of the East Belfast thing, but that there might be people who are younger than me, people in their teens might read it, and so if I’m using language that is totally isn’t what anybody nowadays says, that wouldn’t be very good either. But you don’t want just a local colour literature. You want something that someone is going to enjoy if they’re living in Baltimore or Ballymena or wherever. I think the kind of things that the book deals with are universal… aw, I mean, that sounds awful, “I write literature that has universal application,” but I would hope it kind of does.

SG: It’s the going deep into the individual characters, their minds, even though you don’t involve a broad scope of geography, that really achieves that I think.

WE: That’s good.

SG: Did you have concerns when you were representing such a specific place in a social realist mode? Is there a pressure of responsibility that comes with that? Or was that not something you worried about?

WE: I suppose what I’m generally most interested in is not having a laugh at people. I’m writing about a group of people that maybe don’t get read about that often. (I say “group of people,” but they’re pretty diverse. People say I write about working class people, but at least half of the people in that book aren’t working class). But I don’t know, who do people read about? People in Columbia, New York, having coffee in a coffee shop? I don’t know who we can say are normally in books. But maybe it’s not these people. The only reason I’m saying that is because people have said to me, “Oh I haven’t seen Belfast represented in that way before.” I was very aware I didn’t want to ridicule people. That was my imperative. It wasn’t that I felt responsibility to represent people positively or negatively, but just to present them in a way that isn’t making fun of them. Sometimes I’ve been surprised by responses, take for example, by the character Kyle [from “To All Their Dues”]. So many people have said to me “Aw big Kyle, I love big Kyle, I would have liked a whole story just for Kyle just because he was so cool and funny.” And I was surprised because I thought Kyle was reprehensible in so many ways. And other people said they loved the mother in Locksmiths and that they would have liked more of her.

SG: Let’s talk about your characters. Do you have a whole life for these characters that you have thought about and developed privately, of which you’re only giving us a fragment? Or is their life bounded into the story, developing only through it?

WE: I would say half and half of that. It’s not like I’m compiling sort of dossiers of these characters, but before I start writing I probably spend about a month just thinking about these people, pretty much obsessively to be honest. It kind of annoys my family (not big time); they know that I’m just sitting thinking about it all the time. At present I’m working on a new story about these two women and I’m just thinking all the time, like, what would their settee be like, what would they order at the Chinese, all the rest of it. So for probably about a month before I start writing I will have just thought about them a lot. I won’t actually write things down about them.

SG: Do you start with characters as opposed to events?

WE: Yeah, nearly always. But “Arab States” is based on Death in Venice. I already had the idea that I wanted to do a Death in Venice story but would make it a very different type of a person. “Sweet Home” is based on The New Villa, the Chekhov story, which is just one of my favourite stories, so I thought, right, I’ll just use that kind of a pattern. With those two stories they began already with a kind of a structure because they were based on other stories, and it was just then supplying characters for that. In the Chekhov story New Villa, it’s an engineer and his wife, so I thought, right, I’m not going to have an engineer again, let’s shift it so it’s the woman who has the very professional construction job. So the character becomes an architect. But mainly it’s the characters at the beginning, mainly it’s working with characters first. Those are the exceptions really.

SG: The nature of the short story tends to mean that the reader is dropped into someone’s life and then pulled out again quite quickly, and so the decision-making process in terms of where you end the reader’s relationship with the character is quite an interesting thing. How do you think about those decisions?

WE: It’s really, really hard to generalise with this because with every single precept you give you can think of something that disproves it. It’s nearly always the case that however early you think you need to do start the story you don’t need to, you can go in later. But I think that practically all the rules that I’ve ever heard about short stories you don’t need to use them. Say for example, the Gil Courtney story [“77 Pop Facts Your Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney”] is like an entire life, so it’s basically start to finish. Another thing people tend to say in terms of structure is that you shouldn’t introduce any new characters toward the end, but in “Arab States: Mind and Narrative” a totally new character comes in in the last paragraph and it just totally shifts. As far as I’m concerned that is what I wanted to do and I think it’s OK, the way it operates. I suppose there’s just so many ways to think about short stories. People talk about the epiphany or the anti-epiphany etc, or that it’s supposed to be the day that “something happened,” but it doesn’t need to be like that necessarily.

SG: This seems quite similar to what you were saying about working with a preconceived narrative structure and working around and pushing against that. There might be those short story “rules” but they’re always there to be pushed against.

WE: I went to Dublin to go on that workshop and I had never written a short story other than “Locksmiths” really. (Well, maybe I’d written one thing years ago, but it was terrible). I’d always found [the short story] a bit off-putting because I’d always found it very chilly, very disciplined, very pristine, that these things were beautifully constructed and every single word had been poised over and all the rest of it, like they were Fabergé eggs or something. But I realised fairly quickly that it didn’t need to be like that at all. Something like “To All Their Dues” has three totally different perspectives, and I could have added another two and had five, and it still would have been OK as a short story.

SG: Do you have a favourite character?

WE: [Laughs] You know, it’s really hard to separate out who I think is my favourite from the perceptions of these people brought from others. I kinda like Gil Courtney just because so many people love it. It’s been one that’s totally polarized people. Either they’ve been like “what on earth was that about,” or there are people that have really loved it. I like him because I’m drawn to the sort of losers, the people that life hasn’t worked out for. There are just so many of them that I’m drawn to in real life anyway, like Gene Clark. I kinda like Barry [“The soul has no skin”] because he’s not very showy. Because, what do you do? You just keep on going, and that’s what most people have to do in life.

SG: So Gil Courtney: why did he get that structure in his story “77 Pop Fact Your Didn’t Know,” the list narrative?

WE: I’d written that story so many times. At one point it had been about six or seven thousand words. It had been from the mum’s point of view, it had been from his point of view, it had been just a traditional kind of third person, it had been all different points of view, and it never really worked. And I was speaking to the writer Sean O’Reilly about it and he was saying that if you can make the form mirror somehow the content it’s helpful. We were just talking about how you read about music, read the news: what do you do? And we were thinking about Smash Hits, the kind of lists of facts there. I’d had a Gene Clark one where it was just all his likes and all his dislikes, and I thought something like that might work. And then did it in terms of the list, messed around with it, moved it around a bit, and it seemed to work well.

SG: You could see the characters in the different stories crossing each other on the street. Would you ever take a character out of one story and into another?

WE: Yeah, I would do that. Can you think of one you think would be good?

SG: Grace [“To All Their Dues”] is one of my favourites. She really stayed with me. I don’t know what it was – maybe the balance of mystery that went with so much loss, she’s sort of built out of loss but she’s strong.

WE: You like Grace.

SG: No pressure.

WE: That’s really interesting. Its not like I go around asking people “what do you think of this, what do you think of this.” But for such a long time nobody ever said they liked Grace. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the structure in that story [“To All Their Dues”], but people seemed to want more on all the characters. And I suppose there’s not a massive resolution at all at the end. But loads of people liked Mo, saying “oh why don’t you do a load of stories based in the beauty salon.” And then there were all the Kyle fans. But for ages I didn’t meet anybody that seemed to like Grace. But that’s the character that I’ve ended up reading most whenever I’ve been asked to do readings, and I think it is a character people end up liking.

SG: Your stories are composed specifically out of a contemporary Belfast, which of course puts your readers, especially the local ones, really close to the characters, as if they could also walk past them on the street. But the weight of memory is also very heavy in most of the stories. How did you think about the relationship between memory and the contemporary in place when you were writing these stories, and the mutual pressure of those things?

WE: I suppose in every single one of the stories, in terms of a temporal structure, I’m always trying to work at least three time frames: an immediate present, then there’s maybe a fairly recent past, and then there’s a more distant past. I don’t know why I do that, I just think that who you are, in terms of identity and so on, it is so much to do with the memories you carry with you. For many of the characters in the story I suppose that is totally bound up with a sense of place and at times a sense of place that was maybe very specifically Northern Ireland and what was going on at that time. Not all of them, but some of them.

SG: Obviously the stories are dominated by the urban. Are you a city person?

WE: Yes, absolutely. I think the furthest away they get is a park, that’s the representation of the wilderness, the local park

SG: What about the urban do you love? The shiftiness, the density, or what?

WE: Yeah, the density of it, the constant movement of it. I don’t really like open spaces. It’s not a phobia or anything, I just don’t really like them that much. Even if you took me to somewhere like the Cliffs of Moher or something else that’s absolutely spectacular I know my eye would be drawn to a plastic bag or something that somebody’s left and I’d be commenting on that. I always say I love the train journey to White Head but I love going through Kilroot and the power station. And people go “oh you’re just saying that, you’re just saying that, just for a pose,” but I actually do like that kind of thing.

SG: Do you walk around looking as you’re making these stories or do you sit at a desk remembering?

WE: I sit at my desk, yeah. I sit in the same place. I sit in the kitchen and I can work with everything going on around me it doesn’t matter how noisy it is, with my £150 Tesco computer and just work away. I am pretty nosey, so I probably do notice quite a lot of things when I’m out. But I didn’t specifically try and scope the area or anything like that, it was all really just recollection.

SG: You’ve mentioned music here, and here and in other articles you’ve mentioned artists like George Shaw and Richard Billingham. Were these other mediums an influence on developing these stories?

WE: Yes, totally so. Say for example “Last Supper.” It started off with something by a Dutch guy, Maurice van Tellingen. He does miniatures, little constructions. Its almost like George Shaw but in miniatures, a window or a radiator or whatever. And there’s one that’s of a bleak garden, and there’s a little bird house in this garden. It’s not even that big, it wouldn’t even be a third of the size of this table, but there’s just this tiny little bird house in the middle, and I just found that really moving, and it just made me think of some shelter. I didn’t know what I was going to do, whether this was going to be some shelter for people who are homeless or whether it would be some sort of a house, or a café or whatever, but that was what started me on that one. So quite often it would be things like that. In terms of the “Inakeen” one it was that song “Black Sail.” That kind of combined with seeing a couple of women walking along Albert Bridge Road, of all places. Something was stuck on one of their feet, like a paper bag, and the way she just kicked it off her shoe just reminded me of that song and the way she was dressed in black. I normally never listen to music when I’m writing because I just get too pulled in that direction, but I listened to that a bit and that’s what conjured up that character.

SG: What about writers. Are there particular short story writers that you deliberately went to, or voices you’ve been reading for a long time that came back to you when you were writing this perhaps?

WE: It’s really funny. There’s a book called Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker, and I read it years and years and years ago. Its sort of the Yorkshire Ripper but with a fictional Northern city and there’re guys killing prostitutes. And I was reading it again on a bus not so long ago and I could just pick up so many times I was using her phrasing or so many times I was using even words from it. It’s not the most amazing book by any stretch of the imagination, but it really must have affected me quite profoundly. And another book like that is Light in August by William Faulkner. It’s exactly the same thing: there’re hardly two days go by where I don’t think of that book, of some of the scenes in it. I suppose in terms of short stories I love Chekhov. I just think there’s such a range there. (Obviously, I’ve used one of his stories as a template). I never really thought that I read loads of short stories but I have done over the years. Colin Barrett I think is absolutely incredible. But quite often people that aren’t doing anything of the type that I’m doing. I really like Johanna Walsh, I think what she does is great, I really like Maggie Nelson, I think what she does is brilliant. Sometimes it’s just random stories in a collection.

SG: What come before these stories for you in terms of writing and creative projects?

WE: Whenever I was in my twenties I would have written a novel. So that would have been 1993 or so. And it was awful and I very half-heartedly sent it off to a couple of places. When it got rejected I was like “yes I know it’s terrible, isn’t it.” Then I wrote one story and sent it off to a competition in Belfast somewhere. It was a competition for a woman’s magazine and my story was based on one of those Paula Rego paintings of these girls murdering this man, and it was the most inappropriate story for the competition. So, of course, that went nowhere. And then I did a blog from about 2010. I didn’t get loads of people looking at it but I got a few. It was kind of a music-literature cross-over. I started out thinking I’d review books, but I just found it so impossible and so difficult, and felt so guilty if I said something really negative. So I ended up doing just sort of creative writing and reconstructing album covers using materials I found round my house, things like that. And that was it, nothing after that.

SG: Is the blog still live?

WE: No, no.

SG: What’s next?

WE: I’ve another couple of stories on the go. I’ve got a story in the Faber anthology coming out [Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber and Faber)]. That’s a story about a guy called Mikey Mullholland. He actually goes to White Abbey, so he leaves East Belfast briefly, makes a break away. And then I’ve got another one in the Winter Papers, so it’s coming out soon, and it’s about a country gospel singing group. And then after that I might look at some stories again and see if anything can be done with them. Because sometimes I feel really sentimental about the characters, like I’m abandoning these people if I can’t actually get it to work. And then I have also got a novel that I’m starting to work on too. Some of it’s set in London. About a third of it would be set in Belfast in the 80s in and around the Malone Road, a third set in London in the late 80s early 90s in Kilburn in Brixton, and then the rest set back on the Cregagh Road, my familiar territory. So we’ll see how that goes.

Since the time of this conversation, Picador have bought the international rights to Sweet Home. Wendy has stories forthcoming in Winter Papers 4 and Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber and Faber).

You can buy Sweet Home here: https://stingingfly.org/books/sweet-home/