Wendy Erskine’s first collection of short stories, Sweet Home, published by the Stinging Fly, made its mark as an assemblage of razor-sharp stories that capture the absurd nature of the lives of a diverse group of characters living within the perimeters of East Belfast.
Since its publication, Sweet Home has been loved and lauded by the general public and by critics. It has remained in my subconscious over the past year and has become my go-to for birthday gifts and recommendations. When I meet Erskine, I realise how unsurprising it is that she is the author of such piercing stories: she is effortlessly articulate and insightful and far cooler at 51 than I am at 23.
While Sweet Home has received much acclaim, Erskine recalls how earlier projects were not so successful. In her 20s, she wrote a novel that was rejected by publishers. Erskine admits that the refusals were unsurprising: “I didn’t think what I had produced was all that great and so I thought people were entirely justified in not publishing it. I didn’t have any belief in it at all.” She explains that “if you’re in a kind of a milieu where you don’t encounter people who’ve ever published anything, it just seems such a remote prospect”.
When Erskine signed up to the Stinging Fly’s six-month creative writing workshop 20 years later, the prospect of publication remained distant. Erskine is a teacher and when she was given every Friday off work, she decided to use this time productively. So she took the train or bus to Dublin every Friday to attend the workshop.
I didn’t think what I had produced was all that great and so I thought people were entirely justified in not publishing it, I didn’t have any belief in it at all
During the course, Erskine’s talent became visible and Declan Meade, then the editor of the Stinging Fly, suggested to Erskine that the press might have interest in publishing her stories. Erskine recognised the rarity of this opportunity and committed to writing a 6,000-word story every month for 12 months. One year later, her debut collection had taken shape.
Throughout the collection, Erskine displays a deft control of both dark and humorous material. Erskine turns to the absurd nature of real, normal lives to find humour: “I just find people’s situations very, very funny and I find people on the whole much funnier than people ever seem to be in books.” She emphasises the importance of humour in storytelling: “I think if your story doesn’t have much comedy in it or humour in it, it’s almost as if you purposely tried to avoid that, and I’m not really trying to avoid that. If you’re dealing with things like fear and alienation, a counterbalance is a very useful thing to have.”
She adds: “I actually find life so strange and so bizarre that I’m not interested in putting on a further layer of oddness or bizarreness.”
Even when they are so carefully constructed, Erskine recognises that short stories are often not placed as the acme of literature in the same way as novels. The length of short stories, Erskine suggests, can make them appear frivolous to some people: “I think there is something that people like about weight, length, heft and it becomes really important that you’re reading a big book. People think of it as something, not as an endurance test, but as something significant and weighty and I think that the short story can be seen as more lightweight, I suppose.”
Despite this strange fixation over length, Erskine affirms that short stories are not fleeting forms of entertainment and their residual power rests in their brevity. “I reckon that I can read a novel much more quickly than a collection of short stories because I can’t read one short story after another. I need time to think about what I’ve just read and also can recalibrate to the next story.”
She does, however, note the undeniable appeal of novels. “I can understand as well, though, that people like being immersed in a world. If you’re reading one of these long novels, you’re immersed in a world and you’re looked into that world for quite a period of time, whereas even in a collection like mine which are geographically very similar, there are very different worlds. You’re always having to recalibrate to the new world of the story, which, for some people, is quite a tiresome thing.”
Short stories often require more from their readers. What’s unsaid in a short story is almost as important as what is said, for the reader is only offered, in cliche terms, a “slice of a life” rather than its entirety. Erskine explains how she tries to meet the reader halfway in terms of what is said and what is left to interpret: “Whenever I’m writing, I’m always imagining that I’ve got an intelligent reader and I’m not needing to spell things out too much to this intelligent person. I personally hate writing that I think is patronising me in some way. I don’t like writing that has got major ideological designs on me. If I am noticing that your symbolism is too heavy. If I’m noticing what a writer is doing then it is done too heavily.”
Whenever I’m writing, I’m always imagining that I’ve got an intelligent reader and I’m not needing to spell things out too much to this intelligent person
She hopes that she can create “meaning through their own level of perception and attention to the text” without spelling out the obvious. This, she believes, creates a “satisfying” experience for her readers.
It’s possible that Erskine’s love for short stories began when she was a child. When she was in primary six, she had a teacher who “would put a picture on the board of like a giant redwood or maybe a painting and we would have nearly two hours in the afternoon where we would just write based on what we saw”. Those who wrote well were given a Mars bar to eat during the following week’s class. Erskine remembers these afternoons as being “total bliss”. For other students, Thursday afternoons could be a drag but for Erskine, it was the “best time of the week”.
This unrestricted dive into imagination remains the most satisfying part of writing for Erskine. She notes how people become hung up on discussions of writing rather than enjoying the work without preconceptions or agendas. “I do think there is a lot of nonsense talked about writing and I’m not particularly prepared to go along with what I think are very kind of romantic – with a small ‘r’ and a big ‘R’ – narratives about writing.”
She explains: “Sometimes people think that I treat it casually or that I’m flippant about my own stuff and I’m not. I mean, if I didn’t think that what I was doing was really the best thing I could do then I wouldn’t bother.”
I do think there is a lot of nonsense talked about writing and I’m not prepared to go along with what I think are very kind of romantic narratives about writing
What seems to have remained with Erskine since her creative writing classes in primary six is a sheer love of narrative. While publishing her collection has been incredible, Erskine asserts that the act of writing is far more satisfying than publication.
While writing is often described as a “gift” that is seemingly bestowed upon a selective few from the heavens, Erskine dispels this romantic view and asserts that writing is hard work and can be a very long, sometimes unrewarding journey.
“I honestly – and I know this is very easy for me to say this as somebody who has been published – but I don’t think it’s the be all and end all to be published. You also have to enjoy just doing the writing itself. If you buy a guitar, you do not expect after you’ve learned a couple of chords that that’s going to be you suddenly releasing an album. You realise that you’re going to be spending a lot of time working on what you can actually do as a guitarist.”
While many of us could write for years to no avail, Erskine has innate sensibility, humour and intelligence, allowing her to succeed in creating stories that make your heart beat that bit faster.
