There are too many writers in the world. Too many bad writers. I’ll include myself in that group. No, not false modesty, just how it rolls for the sake of this tale. But you see I have an excuse. I use my bad writing to introduce you to good writing, great writing, writing that will change and inspire you. What purpose is there for bad writing other than to make you yearn for truly great writing?

So, here you go…

Wendy Erskine is a great writer. A true original. A writer whose first collection of short stories Sweet Home contains some of the finest tales ever written. Clever, sassy, nuanced, with a rich seam of dark humor. Erskine’s stories of working class life in East Belfast have been hailed by critics as works of brilliance and her book has been nominated for several awards. Though experience suggests Erskine has worked on these stories and crafted them into things of beauty, they appear so fresh, so fully formed, so organic, that they may have just fallen like ripe fruit straight from the tree.

Go on, take a bite.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland during The Troubles that most dangerous and murderous time in the province’s history, Erskine has produced a wry, wise, funny, and utterly compelling collection of stories. She is the kind of writer that makes you fall back in love with reading. A magician who pulls the Ace of Spades from behind your ear while you’re still wondering how it was removed from your tightly gripped hand in the first place.

Her collection of stories opens with a three-part tale that is compelling and disturbing in equal measure. “To All Their Dues” is centered around a beauty parlor, and the lives of three people: the owner Mo, the local villain Kyle, and his wife Grace. Kyle is a psychopathic character with a pulsing menace few crime novelists have ever imagined or described in such chillingly simple and unforgettable terms. But if that weren’t enough, wait till you meet his wife.

Erskine has a remarkable eye for detail, for character evinced through thought and action, that reminded me of John Updike, Fitzgerald, or the Scottish writer James Kelman.

That long thin scar, running along the inside of your thigh, lady in the grey cashmere, what caused that? Those arms like a box of After Eights, slit slit slit, why you doing that, you with your lovely crooked smile, why you doing that? The woman with the bruises round her neck, her hand fluttering to conceal them. Jeez missus, is your fella strangling you? But you don’t ask, why would you?

While the second tale “Inakeen” works, its ending felt slightly contrived in a way that J. G. Ballard sometimes forced his stories to fit a purpose. Even so, it’s a small quibble but is another story that sticks long after reading. “Observation” about two teenage girls and an older man is a powerful work about what’s left unsaid between knowing and action. “Locksmiths” is about the troubled relationship between a daughter and her mother just released from jail. “Last Supper” deals with a manager covering for two employees having sex in a diner’s restroom. “Arab States: Mind and Narrative” and the devastating “Sweet Home” (parts of which I had to stop reading because it hit me so hard) show a writer who is in full control of their talent and knows exactly what she wants to say and how best to say it.

But how to interview such a writer? By email of course. But let’s not get too serious, or ahead of ourselves. Let’s start our interview with Erskine as if this was for one of those teen-pop magazines like Smash Hits:

Writer of the Week: Wendy Erskine

Starsign:  Taurus.

Favourite color: Duck egg blue.

First record bought:  “Ma Baker” by Boney M.

Favourite food: Green papaya salad, really hot.

First gig: Depeche Mode, the Ulster Hall, 1983.

Favourite band: Velvet Underground.

Favourite singer: Small Faces era Steve Marriott

Favourite artist:  Maurice van Tellingen

If you were Prime Minister/President what would be your first law: No one can earn100 times more than someone else.
 

 
Now let’s get to the important part of why you should go out now and buy a copy of Erskine’s book ‘Sweet Home’ without passing go or collecting $200—but of course, reading the following first.

When did you start writing or when did you start seriously thinking about becoming a writer?

Wendy Erskine: I’ve always enjoyed writing ever since I was a kid.  It always gave me pleasure, making up stories, making up people.  Over the years, I would have written all sorts of things, mainly for my own amusement.  In 2015, I had one afternoon a week off work for the year, and I thought I should try to do something useful with it, rather than just mooching around the town.  And so I went on a 6 month fiction course in Dublin run by the Stinging Fly magazine.  But to be honest, I could just as easily have decided to spend that afternoon a week in a gym somewhere, trying to get in shape.  Or I could have spent it trying to learn the oboe or something.  There was an element of chance to it all.  But once I started on the course, I thought, I can do this.  But I still don’t think of myself as a writer really.  I have a full-time job doing something else.

What was your first story?

WE: I once wrote a gruesome story about some teen girls like something from Paula Rego killing a paedophile.  It was for a competition in a glossy Northern Ireland mag: you know, the kind of publication that advertises local interior design companies and garden centres.  It really wasn’t what they were looking for, obviously. After that, I wrote no more short stories until I had to submit one if I wanted a place on the Stinging Fly workshop.  I was re-grouting a bathroom floor at the time, and listening to something about jails on the radio, so I ended up writing a story that combined DIY and a woman being released from prison.  It was only 3000 words but when I finished it, I felt like I’d written the Odyssey.  It got me on the course, and ended up in Sweet Home.  It’s called Locksmiths.

How do you write? Longhand, typing? Quiet? Background noise?

WE: Nearly all of the time I write at my kitchen table.  People are always coming in and out, bickering, asking me where their tracksuit top is, asking, why is there never any food in this house?  I don’t really find it a distraction.  But it’s funny, I can never listen to music at all when I’m writing.  I get too caught up in the mood of it, or the sentiment, or the beat.  I can zone out from real life and family, but not music.  Hmm, maybe that doesn’t reflect well on me.  If I am just checking work or tidying it up, I listen to stuff like Endless Boogie. They are so great.

What was it like being brought up during ‘The Troubles’? Do you think, anyone apart from those who lived in Northern Ireland at the time understand what it was like?

WE: Well to start I would say that what it was like being brought up during the Troubles was so different, depending on where you lived and your own particular background.  There isn’t any homogenous troubles experience, I suppose.  Of course, for me there were specific things – like the time I was in a bomb – but the defining element of the place is the normalisation of a dysfunctionality.  There are so many things that in retrospect seem utterly surreal but which were totally quotidian and commonplace.  There’s a very great line in the David Keenan book set in Belfast, For the Good Times, where a character says that before someone submits to the sonic assault of Hawkwind surely they don’t ask whether the group are Protestant or Catholic?  Fact is, that’s exactly what some people would have done.  And some might still. It’s still a very strange, fragile and wounded place. Other people can understand it.  If you are from any other place where aberrant behaviours were legitimised, where there is still sublimated hatred, where you have need for truth and reconciliation commissions, then you get Northern Ireland.

Tell me about your life—university? music? the path you took to get here?

If you have five seconds to spare, I’ll tell you the story of my life.  I seem to have spent expanses of it doing absolutely nothing.  There are years, many years, where I can’t remember anything much happening at all.  That said, I’m a happy enough person.  I like simple stuff like listening to music, dancing about, reading, drinking tequila, talking and having a laugh with friends, eating crisps, testing eyeshadows in shops, spying on people, writing things. That’s what I probably spent my time doing in those wilderness years.  Also, I had two kids.

I went to university in Glasgow.  There used to be a magazine called Just Seventeen and every week they went to a different city, took photos of young people and asked them what they were into.  Seventeen-year-old me just got all of my mags and looked at where it was that I liked most of the people on those pages. And it was Glasgow, and so I applied there.  That was a great because as far as I am concerned Glasgow is a wonderful city. In the mag there was a pic of a guy called Billy with a quiff who liked Josef K or something.  I was always looking out for him, but I never met him.  Anyway, I lived there for about 8 years, then spent four years in England before moving back to Belfast.

I’ve always worked as a teacher in a school.  Sounds tediously worthy, I know, but I wanted to do something with a socially useful dimension. Plus, unless you are looking at a Miss Jean Brodie type, there isn’t really too much ego in that world.

Which writers do you like?

WE: I like Gordon Burn, William Faulkner, Virginie Despentes, Jade Sharma, Frances Molloy, Vigdis Hjorth, Fernando Sdrigotti, John Fante, Adelle Stripe, Ben Myers, Laura Hird, Clemens Meyer, Lara Pawson, Kevin Curran, Alan Parks, John Niven, Caoilinn Hughes, James Kelman.

A dull but necessary question—What inspires you?

WE: Just generally, anyone who approaches whatever they do with pride and care, regardless of whether it makes them a lot of money, or whether they are considered ‘successful’ in any conventional way.  You know, I’m always going to be drawn to some little record label or shop or press doing what it does with the kind of brio that comes from commitment and love.  Like say, Misty Lane Music in Rome.  Also, a single mother bringing up three teenage sons and doing whatever she can to stop them going off the rails.  That’s inspiring.  But in terms of stories, it can come from absolutely anywhere: a look I see someone give another person in a bar, a conversation with a taxi driver about his sister in law, a comment on a YouTube video.  I’ve had a lot of ideas from comments on YouTube videos.

Do you plan before you write? Or, does it come in a flash and must be written?

WE: Sometimes I will have an idea of how I think a story should end.  But mainly I don’t.  I tend to think about a story for about a month before I put pen to paper.  Mostly I am just thinking about the characters involved, trying to get to know them.  It is a lovely part of the process really.  I’m making it sound quasi-mystical, these people appearing from nowhere that I have to get to know, but there is a very transcendent element to it.  If you pay enough attention to the characters, the story tells itself.  But I am wary of any of these absolutist pronouncements people make about writing, or any kind of art.  Somebody else will do it entirely differently.

Tell me three things you think have ‘shaped’ or helped you as a writer? Why?

WE: Sentimentality is unearned emotion.  I try to avoid unearned emotion.

Complex people are not necessarily clever, self-aware or stylish. (I never write about self-identified ‘clever’ people who wear beautiful clothes and spend a long time anatomising their thoughts).

The world of literary fiction is just another branch of showbiz.  It’s important to remember that. People who think otherwise are kidding themselves.
 
Wendy Erskine’s superb collection of stories ‘Sweet Home’ available here.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
If you like PKD, Burroughs, or Vonnegut then you should be reading Séb Doubinsky
The strange allure of PAN Books: Vintage cult film, TV tie-in and fab fiction book covers
J. G. Ballard: A gallery of 1980s book covers
Pulp friction: Vintage matchbooks transformed into tiny pulp novel book covers (and more)