Last night saw Trinity Literary Society (Lit Soc) play host to a reading and Q&A session with former Lit Soc Chair and esteemed short story writer Thomas Morris. The event took place in the intimate and warm Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) Common Room, adorned with plush red sofas and an imposing portrait of Samuel Beckett. The event was led by Chair of Lit Soc, Ruth Atkins, who introduced Morris as not only a former chair of the society but certainly “the most important”, as Morris joked.
Atkins gave a brief overview of his projects to date, including Dubliners 100, a centennial “cover” version of Joyce’s iconic Dubliners, reinterpreted by 15 of Ireland’s most prominent writers. Morris personally prefers the term “cover” to “re-telling” and was inspired by a Grafton St busker butchering Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. This caused him to reflect upon the ways in which musicians often rely on covers to kickstart their career, and how this often isn’t the case in literature. Highlights from Dubliners 100 include John Boyne’s version of “Araby” which is retold as a gay love story; Sam Coll’s “Grace”, which is set in student haunt Workman’s Club; and Peter Murphy’s “The Dead”, which he set in a post-apocalyptic setting. Murphy was the only person who agreed to tackle the monumental story, a challenge which many turned down. Morris had initially been reluctant to commit to the project, stating that it was “hugely arrogant of me to take it on, I’m Welsh – not Irish”, but then concluded that “if you don’t do it, someone else will, and it’ll probably be a dickhead”.
Morris’s most recent publication is his breakthrough short story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, which has been nominated for numerous awards including Wales Book of the Year and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. The collection contains 11 short stories, each situated in his hometown of Caerphilly, in South Wales.
Morris begins with reading excerpts from his story “Clap Hand” and returns to his book after the Q&A to read an excerpt from “Strange Traffic”. These two stories feature isolated individuals trapped in monotonous routines, whether it’s Amy being depended on by her mother, or Jimmy Hughes’s incessant proposals. These stories are brought to life by Morris’s cascading Welsh accent. Although Morris states that there is no Welsh literary tradition in the English language, there is something Dylan Thomas-esque about the comic absurdity of his characters’ interactions with others, and the momentary unravelling of their lives. In the Q&A, Atkins mentions these heightened moments and the sense of uncertainty throughout the collection. In response, Morris stresses that “when I think back to moments of identification in reading, they’ve often had to do with those small turning points”, and translating moments of experience into adequate reading experiences.
On his writing methods, Morris shares many tips. One of which, he learned from experience: don’t try to persuade others of how clever you are – in other words, nobody likes the pretentious student who relentlessly brings up Marx at parties. His advice is to just relax and allow an element of uncertainty in the writing to manifest in its form. Morris also explores the writer’s greatest dilemma – how do you make your story stand out from others while remaining true to you? For Morris, this lies in the writer’s treatments of the characters. Secondary characters need their own agency and motivations – they cannot just exist in relation to the main character.
Music is another way in which Morris explores his writing techniques. When writing his collection, he would listen to the same songs on loop in order for him to enter a certain mental condition. He compares music to “a tuning fork… a good cue to taking you back into the same time zone of writing.” Another surprising source of inspiration for Morris was his hometown of Caerphilly. He had been worried of coming across as “corny” and “clichéd”, especially as a younger writer. However, it came naturally for Morris as he knew the people there, and “the stories came alive in a way I hadn’t anticipated.” Morris believes that you should “write what you know and know what you write.” In his Creative Writing MA at University of East Anglia, he was taken aback at how intrigued his multi-cultural classmates were by his hometown. When assembling the collection, he realised the importance of subjectivity over objectivity: “no place is going to be the same, it is your interiority and it is coloured by your experience.” This epiphany impacted his writing style, and challenged him to present the same locations perceived from different ways.
A couple of the questions in the Q&A are directed at the contemporary nature of his stories, and their allusions to technology. In response, Morris reveals more about his writing process: writing in the dark lonely hours between 11pm and 3am in order to enter a state of meditative depression. In these lonely hours he’d often find himself turning to Facebook and felt a numbing effect as he scrolled through past photos of his friends, which he likens to the Afterlife technology which features in one of his stories. “Technology is our anaesthetic, and literature is an aesthetic.” It is these moments where human instincts are bridged with technology that there is “drama to be unearthed.” Morris also emphasises the need for contemporary writers to not shy away from representing their contemporary era, and that technology is what marks it.
Morris is currently Contributing Editor of the Stinging Fly publication, and mentions the importance of a community of writers, something which he has appreciated since commencing his studies at Trinity: “Had I not moved to Ireland, I don’t think I would have written.” He reflects fondly on his time in the Literary Society, and how he “gravitated towards people who were writing”, and how they were healthy competition with one another His greatest experience of Lit Soc was in his final year as chair when he invited writers to speak, and to his surprise, many responded. Being in the company of Roddy Doyle and the likes in the opportunistic setting of Trinity is what spurred Morris to be the writer he has become today. And last night, we experienced a similar opportunity.
