 Hello everyone and welcome to the Irish Writers' weekend in London hosted by the British Library and Association with Kirch International Festival of Literature. I'm Manuela Moser, the newly appointed director of Kirch and we are absolutely delighted to be here for what will be a fantastic, thought-provoking and celebratory weekend of events. Thank you to B-Rollett and John Fawcett for doing such a great job in organising all of this and bringing together all of these brilliant Irish writers. We're grateful for the support of Culture Island, the Embassy of Ireland in London and our hotel partners, The Doyle Collection, without whose support this wouldn't be possible. And thank you so much to all of the staff and volunteers. We hope that you enjoy the talks and readings that will unfold over the course of these two days. And thank you so much for joining us. Now please welcome to the stage Peggy Hughes, Wendy Erskine and Jan Carson. My name's Peggy Hughes and a great pleasure to be here today with Wendy Erskine and Jan Carson. We're going to format just to get that out of the way. We're going to have a chat about both of their remarkable books, The Raptures by Jan and Dan Smooth by Wendy. And then I'm going to remind you right from the very top that this is your chance really to ask your questions as well so do get thinking and I'll remind you again before we finish. Before I get into the bios for both Wendy and Jan, I just wanted to note for those that maybe didn't hear that Louise Kennedy unfortunately is no longer able to be at this event as you'll see from the stage. And we're really very sorry about that, but she's fresh obviously from winning the novel of the year, so fair play. Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast in her debut collection, Sweet Home, was published with Sting and Fly in 2018, but this is the one we're on today which is Dan Smooth. And I will say just at this juncture that the books are available over in the main library foyer where we will all be running after the event and hope that you will run behind us so you can get your copy and get it signed. Wendy as well has been shortlisted and won several prizes, a long listed for the Gordon Burn Prize among others. And her second collection of stories was adapted for broadcast on Radio 4, which well some of you may have heard. And she has just finished a fellowship with the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, which also we may well talk a wee bit about. Before we get into it, I would just love it if you would join me again in giving them a really warm welcome to the theatre. Thank you. So I think before we get into the actual books themselves, I think we'll have, we've got an hour together today by the way I should say. I think we'll have a little bit of a chat about just the context of being a writer from the north, a Northern Irish writer and what that means to both of you. First of all, Jan will come to you if I may. Do you think it is possible, this is a big question maybe, but is it possible to be a writer from Northern Ireland and not write about the north? I think it is possible and I do think that a lot of writers are now reserving the right to write about the same things that writers from around the world are writing about. They're concerned about gender and sexuality and financial issues and the environment and all of those big important issues we're all concerned about and not within a particular Northern Irish context. For me, I was born in 1980 right in the middle of the Troubles and I feel like I kind of have stagnated in the Troubles in the context of the north and even when I try to write about other things it just seems to sneak into my work all the time. For me personally, I think it would be very difficult to write something that isn't related in some ways to the socio-political context of Northern Ireland. As writers, we are first and foremost storytellers. We have no prerequisite to change the world or engage with the big issues you fall in love with a character and you tell a story. Just so happens my characters are mostly living in Northern Ireland and they're also stagnating in the socio-political context of Northern Ireland. For me personally, I find it very hard to avoid outpegs. I agree with Jan absolutely. If you are a writer, your obligation is to nothing and nobody other than your creation. If you want to write a novel about people obsessed with doorknobs or tortoises or something or other like that and have no reference whatsoever to socio-political situation, there's no problem with that. That's absolutely what you should do if that is what your artistic purpose is. For me, I want to write about, mostly what I want to write about is people living in a sort of very particular social milieu. So I'm normally writing about people around the same number of streets. However, people are totally wrong. I think if they think there's some sort of homogenous troubles experience or north experience because people encounter it very differently. It depends on where you live. It depends on your political class. It depends on your own specific history. There are so many different variables that are going to result in different sorts of experiences being presented in fiction. For me, it would run from somebody whose life has been in a story like Lillian Dog from First Collection, very, very intimately connected to the troubles, if that's your own column. Whereas there might be another character and it has hardly touched them at all. I don't mean there's another character out in that collection that's a sort of a pop star, monkey, cybarth style person. It's irrelevant that he's from Belfast. Absolutely irrelevant to him and his character. Class, plays a dimension, but not necessarily being from Belfast. So I suppose what I'm trying to say is it's a much, much, much more complex thing than just, yeah, this is Northern Ireland or the north of Ireland. It's going to reflect this way in somebody's writing. It's all sorts of different experiences, different people. Wendy, do you find, though, that no matter what way you're out, we still get asked the political questions? I honestly think you could write a book about fluffy bunnies for children and as soon as people hear you're from the north, they'll be like, can you explain the NI protocol, please? I remember us having a chat about this one time, Janet. You said a really interesting thing that you felt that writers from, say for example, England of maybe the same age would never be asked constitutional questions about the UK, that writers from the north of Ireland would never be asked. It just comes with the territory, literally, that's what you're going to be asked about. In some ways, it's not a bad thing. We're adult people. Why should we not be asked about politics? You know, it's not wrong. But at the same time, as you say, it puts a layer onto someone's writing or a sort of a narrow's interpretation sometimes to always look for that. Yeah, and sometimes you just want to talk about writing and not about Brexit or Borders or Boris Johnson. Totally. So the next book coming from Jan Carson is Fluffy Bunnies. Brexit or Borders. Something you've just said there, Jan, about what sneaks in and what doesn't. You know, Kevin Barry said that when he moved into a sort of old barracks and he said, oh, you know, I knew the old Zagarda would kind of sneak into the work and so they did. What else sneaks in and how do you repel it or resist it? Do you? I mean, is there stuff that sort of tries to get in that you don't want? I think the stuff that sneaks in is the really good stuff, to be honest. I love Wendy's work. I have the joy and the pleasure of living in the neighbourhood that Wendy writes about a lot. It definitely sneaks into her work so much and it colours when I walk through East Belfast High. I look at things like tanning salons and I'm looking through the window going, there's probably a story unfolding there because Wendy's highlighted the possibility of that. For me, the thing that's sneaking through a lot at the minute is language. I grew up not really here in Northern Irish accents on the TV or the radio except if it was someone playing a paramilitary or a drunk and that's not the healthiest kind of context to grow up in as a child and even later on when Northern Irish accents did start to appear in films and TV programmes, they weren't Balamena ones like mine. Balamena is still waiting for its artistic revival. That's just the nice way to put it. So to be able to write in the vernacular of the place that you're from and to be able to, I went back to my local primary school about three months ago with this book to do some work with the P7 kids there and they all wrote stories and then they said, one of the wee girls said, Jan, what's a better way of saying that? And she's written a beautiful sentence in her Balamena tongue. I said, hold on now. There's no better way of saying that. Your words, your language, the way you use language is beautiful. And a lot of people have bought this book about kids like you in this school talking like you. So they think that your stories and your language is of worth as well. And that's something that's really important if you're not from London, if you're not from Edinburgh or places where people talk posh. It's really important that young people are able to hear themselves reflect it in work. So I guess that's what's sneaking into the margins of my work at the minute language. Just on that note though, is there anything, because I know you do quite a lot of your, you know, thrown out there on Twitter, what would be a Northern Irish word for whatever X, you know? Are there any words that just don't travel? And I think I'm thinking of Anna Burns, you know, when Milkman came out, people, certainly the rhythms, you know, kind of, I think would be travelled interestingly. It was super interesting. I sat, we had attached the University of Lorraine at the minute and they had a Bondi academic symposium on my work last Friday. And I listened to my French translator and Spanish translator talk about the joys of trying to translate Northern Irishisms. So they're definitely, it's not what you think. It's words like Georgie Best was very hard to translate because for us in the north when you put in Georgie Best, yes, it means a footballer and a really great footballer, but it's also the connotations of, you know, Georg Best's lifestyle and what he came to represent. And that doesn't translate as well. So there are words like that. For me, the most problematic one was the word Boke. Boke is the Northern Irish word. I think that just travelled though. I suspect we have some Northern Irish in the audience. Boke is the word for vomiting. And I wanted to get the phrase or spelling correct so I put it on Twitter. How do you spell Boke?Don't ever do that. I just got 130 replies that were Boke, Boke, Boke, Boke, Boke, Boke. B-O-A-K-E, B-O-Q-U-E, which somebody commented, that's just bookun' with notions. So you have to be very careful when you use Twitter for research. Dwyotheb. Wendy, for you, Dan, you know, what is sneaks in? poleg y cwestiynau. Sometimes it's just stuff that you don't realize that you're really obsessed with, and so sometimes what I've noticed in my stories is that people are constantly bleaching things. They're bleachin sinks, they're bleaching- no, I know I got bleached hair, but they're bleaching their hair they're bleaching sinks and I normally have to cut out some of that bleaching because it becomes so repetitive and you think, what am I trying to do there? I don't know if it's something about- I've got to say as well, my house does not see a lot of bleach. So this is not something that's my own personal obsession. But it's something to do with in some way trying to, a symbolic thing in the story I think, a symbolic purification in some way. But I suppose there's other things as well. One of my friends was saying to me about how there's lost children a lot of the time, missing children, and that crops up in a lot of the stories. Rwy'n ddweud y gwnaeth y cofnodd, ymlaen nawetio gweithio y cyfnodd. Rwy'n ddweud i'r bobl fod yn eich cofnodd dy hefyd o'r honnodd ac y mynedd. Gall thanks yn ei wneud gael hawddau a chyferiad o'r cyfnodd, yn ddweud allanias angen o arddangos arna o'r llys. Felly mae'n adynnodd a'r cyfnodd o'r llywodd ac efallai'n gallu llywodd a'r adynnodd. Mae'r llwysbeth i'r cyfnoddion, mae'r llwysbeth yw'r cywledd yn bwysigol, mae'r cyfnoddion rhywbeth yw'r llwysbeth sydd yn ei dyfodol. Ond mae'r llwysbeth yw ddweud yn y llangwyd, mae'r cyfrifio, oherwydd y cerddau, mae'n gwybod o'i hyn yn gweithio i'r gwaith yng Nghymru, ac mae'n ddiddorol y cyfnoddion o'u cyfrifio yma yw'r rhwngor, a'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'i gael yng Nghymru, bydd yn ymwneud o'r cwmwyllt yn ni gael y cyfnod i gael efallai gael y ffordd, ac mae'n ceisio'n gwneud o'r unrhyw o'r prif er mwynhau. Mae'r cyfrif yn ysgrifennu, fel y dda nhw, mae'n amser y Peth yn y bwysig i'r newid yn y cyfrif. Mae'n cyfrif yn y cwmwyllt, mae'n cyfrif yn yw'r cyfrif yn y bwysig i'r newid. Rwy'n credu fydd y teimlo o'r ffordd o'r creu rhan o'r rhai ffordd o'r llwyddo? Dysgwyl gyda'r ffordd yma, chi ddim yn ddweud â'r gwaith ar y gweld? Felly nid yn wneud hynny ar y 2016. Rwy'n fydden nhw'n gwneud hynny ar y 50. Oeddwn yn Glasgow i gael eu gyrs, a'r gyrs, a'r gyrs, i gael i'r newydd Casl-a Pwyntain. A dyna, yn ymddangos, yn ymddangos, rwy'n ddech chi'n gweithio ar Nôrden Arlen. There were lots of things so I came back in 1997. There were lots of things that at first I found really kind of jarring or frightening or whatever. Murals, that sort of thing. And then within a couple of weeks I almost didn't see them. They had a new normality had been established. So I would have to say that in terms of the writing, I never really did any writing then at all. I suppose in terms of writing, in terms of... If you're thinking about yourself and the influences, Glasgow would play a massive role, and Scotland just generally, I would always love to think of myself as a rebel ink writer, decades after rebel ink, but in terms of the actual writing, no. Thank you. I'm probably quite similar to Wendy, I started writing, I lived in the States in Portland in Oregon for four years and it's where I started writing, but back then I was writing very generic things that were set in a kind of unspecified place. And it was only when I came back home to Northern Ireland that I began to very specifically hone in on writing about the North, and I write on my feet. I walk a lot round East Belfast, round the city centre, most of my writing is actually done up here just looking at people. I write in a coffee shop in East Belfast every morning where I can look out at the bus stop on the Newton Arts Road and see the people there. So I've been in France for two months of a four-month residency and I'm really struggling. I cannot look out the window and see any East Belfast people or listen to the peculiarities of the accent. I'm an awful one for Eriewagon on conversations and buses and shops and the line at Tesco's, and obviously I can't do that in France. So I'm not writing very much, which is a bit worrying. So maybe both of us need to be quite immersed in the place that you're from. I guess I do a lot of community arts work as well and I would never steal someone's story from those experiences, but you are stealing little glimpses of people's experiences, like the nuances of how they respond. They all go into characters and when you're not immersed in the community that you're writing about, I personally find it really difficult, although every writer writes differently some people like that distance. Is that the case for you, Wendy, or otherwise? Well, I work in a school. I'm a full-time teacher, so I work in a secondary school and that takes up a lot of my time. I just try to write in the evenings whenever the job is done, basically. In terms of what I'm trying to do, I want to live in the real world and I don't want to, in some ways, just as you're saying, John, I want to have characters and stories that are kind of quite divorced from the people I actually encounter in the real world. To me, that's pretty important. I don't want to compromise other people whatsoever. Sometimes people will say to me, oh, this would make a great story for you. I kind of think, nope, it wouldn't, because I don't want to have to use that. So, suppose with me, it's the same in the sense that character is key and getting to know these characters that kind of, it always sounds really mystic, Meg, sort of slightly Dora Stokes, whenever I say this, but I'm wanting these people to kind of manifest themselves to me and for me to kind of get to know them. So, in a sense, yes, they're going to be based on occasional words or song lyrics or whatever that I might have encountered at some point in my life, but essentially I always feel they're somehow beyond me and I'm trying to get to know them. Does that sound weird? No, no, no, it's right. There's something about kind of the atmosphere of it. Like, I was home for 24 hours there before I came here and I got on the glider, which is our fancy bus we have now in A Spell Fest, and it just was this moment where I was like, there you are. That's what people sound like, just to be absolutely surrounded by mostly we lad slapping each other, but hearing that kind of language and even how people like, what's the thing you do with word verbs? Conjugate. Conjugate. Conjugate. Conjugate. How they conjugate the F word in Belfast is so creative. And listening to them hear that, I've been missing in that, so sometimes it's not the specifics of things, it's more immersed in yourself in the kind of general feeling of the place. Sonic backdrop, as it were. I'm glad that Jen's bringing the F word and the book to the British Library, it's all good. Very classic. It's lovely. No, I wanted to come to you, Andy, with the characters in Dance Move specifically. You just said that idea of channeling them or bringing them out. Can you just tell us a bit more? With stories, of course, there's several, even if it's the same world, there are several worlds, several little statelets of little kingdoms, as you said. Can you talk to us about some of the creation of some of these ones? The weather in which this book was written, I suppose. With a story collection like this, there's 11 stories, so in a sense what you've got is probably about 24 minimum central characters. Even though I'm always writing about the same sort of general area, each world is totally different. I always say about, you know, it's exhausting to finish off writing what, and it sounds ridiculous to say somebody that's working as a scaffolder for made a set that's so exhausting writing short stories. It seems absolutely preposterous, but to have to keep building up a new world is sometimes quite a challenge. So I would start in this book with a story called Mathematics, and it's about a woman called Roberta, and her job is to clean Airbnb's or to clean some sort of short-term lets after there's been parties and after there's been all sorts of guests. And in one of these short-term lets, she finds a child that has been left behind from one of the parties, and she doesn't know what to do about this, she doesn't know, she doesn't want to go to the police because of certain circumstances, and what happens then is there's quite a transformational relationship then for both of these people. It's kind of an old story, sort of like a Silas Marner story of how a child coming into someone's life can be a transformational thing. So with a story like that, I don't put pen to paper for about four weeks, and I just think about it as I'm walking about some domain of business, I just think about it, and I'm just trying to get to know these people. And then what I do is I always write a very, very long first draft. So maybe my usual length of story is about 6,000 words or so, but I would probably write 20,000 first draft, maybe three times what I need, and I'm just trying to get to know the characters, and I don't often know what way it's going to go. It's quite exciting because I just don't know what way things are going to happen, and I get to know the characters and I get to know the rhythms, and after I've written that 20,000, I read it quite clinically then and think, OK, what do we have here? Who's of interest here? Who's speaking to me? So that would be one of the stories. I could go on all day, I'm sure, but I'll only tell you about the one because I don't want to bore you. Well, I'll do. No, it's really interesting. I mean, I think we could listen to it all day, but when you're coming back through those 20,000 words, what are you seeking? Is it top notes or what do you know? How do you know what to keep, I suppose? I think what I'm looking to keep is who is speaking to me most loudly, and it's so unpredictable. Sometimes there's somebody that I've thought is the absolute central concern of a story is actually really quite peripheral, and somebody else who's just there in the margins ends up being somebody that I think is much more interesting, and quite often as well, I don't know what a story is about until I've read that first draft. So say, for example, the title story is called Dan Smooth, and it's about a woman who becomes really just quite... She becomes really quite annoyed about her daughter and the way her daughter is doing these inappropriate dances with her friend to music, and at first I thought, yeah, this is a story about fears to do with teen sexuality, fears for your child in this whole arena, and then I thought, no, it's actually not that at all. It's about this own woman's sense of stubbornness, the fact that there were certain things that happened in her own life which have meant that she hasn't really been able to move in a sort of literal and metaphorical way, and I didn't really realise that whenever I was writing it until quite near the end, so it's a lovely thing whenever your own writing sort of surprises you. What's also lovely is it goes out to other people. As soon as I've finished the full stop and it's appearing somewhere, it becomes your story as much as it is mine, and if you tell me what I say in it is something totally different, well, wonderful. Jen, we're going to hear it from not any of the stories you mentioned in a wee second, I think Wendy Mintoamori, which is heartbreaking, but can you tell us, you're a story writer too, is it similar? Yeah, I've been seen with writing novels as well. I feel like Wendy and I are just going, yes, exactly what Wendy just said, but it's fascinating and it's quite heartening to hear someone else articulate how you write as well. Spoiler alert, there's 11 dead children in this book. My publisher keeps saying, if you're going to tell people that you killed off 11 children during the pandemic, you need to also tell them it's quite a funny book. It is funny despite the children all dying, but there originally were 13 dead children, and my editor said 13 to too many. 11 is fine, but get rid of two of them. For me, that was quite painful because before I wrote the book, the novel took three months to write, but I spent six months writing short stories about each of those 13 children. Similar to what Wendy's talking, Wendy's talking about a 20,000 word draft of a short story. I wrote 6,000, 4,000 word short stories about each character just to kind of find out, well, what matters to you and how do you see the world and what do you do when you get angry and what upsets you? The process then of writing the novel, of putting them into a situation where they were under pressure and scary things were happening, it felt like I know how my mum reacts in situations because she's real to me. I knew how these kids would react because they sort of felt real and fully formed to me. So it was probably the easiest book I've ever written. It was a nightmare to edit, but it was really easy to write because of that. That thing that Wendy's talking about, of just listening to your characters really intently, I used to hear authors say, oh, my character told me to do that, or my character wanted to say that. That's never happened to me, but they have told me quite firmly what they wouldn't do or what they wouldn't say. You're trying to push me as a kind of mechanism for your narrative and I wouldn't react like that or I would never speak like that. That only comes whenever you've spent a significant amount of time getting to know them, walking around Belfast in the rain, having conversations in your head with them. For me, Nick and Waybits of lots of different people, I'd be like, oh, that character's got my auntie Audrey's sense of pernicadiness and that character's got a bit of this man that I know who's kind of the rage that's under the surface. So they become these real people to you? I think from what you said, that's not your typical approach, though, Jan, to take each character and have a story. Is that something you would do again based on what you think? I didn't do it again because originally I thought of publishing the novel alongside the short story collection, so the short stories were all set the summer before the book was so that readers could read the collection and I'll be really honest, some of them were shite. Nobody would have wanted to write them in a collection, so we didn't do that in the end and I have a short story collection coming out next year and three of the best ones from the Raptures are going into that. But I think there's so much of what we do as writers that you guys never get to see. You don't get to see the messy bits and the frustration of, I wrote all of these short stories and they didn't turn out like they were in my head. I always think it's a bit cruel. The visual artists went to the National Gallery yesterday and when people are now exhibiting the sketches that were made to go into this finished product, most people don't see that part for what we do, but it does happen, folks. There's a lot more of it than you'd think. A lot of failed projects. You should bring your jotters along, manuscripts, so we could do a show and tell next time. I know I was talking to Donald Ryan, they started an archive of his work in Boston and we've talked about, how honest do you be? Do you show them really bad messy crafts in the notebooks so they're almost their versions? On that note, let's hear from both books. Maybe Jan will come to you first and then we'll come to you, Wendy. If you tell us a wee bit of context as to what we're going to hear. This novel is set in a fictional village called Ballelac outside Ballamina in County Antrim in 1993. It's set mostly around a local rural primary school and an illness is sweeping through the children, killing them off one at a time. It is cheerier than that sounds. We see it mostly through the eyes of Hannah, who's 11 years old and she's the only child who hasn't come down with this illness and she wonders what's going on. I'm going to read you this little section where Ross has just died. It gives you an introduction to kind of the social context of what Ballelac is set against and it's also really fun to read because there's some bits of language in it. Ross had only just turned 11. He was still a child though the thought of girls was already pressing. He'd sometimes go through the case catalogue for pictures of women in bras and pants. He'd yet to touch a girl himself. Had yet to taste coffee or travel anywhere in an airplane. He'd been looking forward to Lanzarote. It would have been his first time in a foreign place. Poor Ross. It's never easy going first. There's been no talk of the boys passing yet. It'll be mid-morning before the news spreads. In the houses and farms of Ballelac people are getting on with their everyday doing. They're feeding the cows and drinking tea, watching the tally and heading to bed. There's no expectation that tomorrow will be much different from today. 93 has been an unremarkable year and the summer's shaping up to be equally forgettable. It's neither hot nor particularly damp. It isn't a World Cup year or one for the Olympics. Measures in Downing Street, Clinton's in the White House. Folks aren't sure what to make of him. Keep an eye on that one. He's got notions they like to say. There's talk of Clinton wading into the Troubles. Word is, he thinks he can sort it out. Let the same fella have a run at it better than him I've tried and failed. Down south, Ireland win the Eurovision for the umpteenth year in a row. In your eyes is the song and question. You'd have a hard time dancing to it though it's got a catchy hook. Makes a change from the usual earnest shite. Plonk, plonk, plonk and words about peace. What are the young ones listening to? Shaggy, ace of ace, too unlimited. Feel good Euro hits. They don't sound half so feel good pumping through the tinny speakers of the GAA clubs and community centres where Ulsters yth hang out. Dancing, smoking, drinking, cheap vodka to cant it into front of balls. No, no limits will reach for the sky. The youngsters sing fist pumping furiously to the beat. Black bomber jackets sucking up their sweat. Go buck mad every time no limits comes on. Sure it's only a chin to them. Not the quality arms it could be. No limits indeed. What a load of bollocks. These kids heal from ochre, clocher and cullibaggy. Say it out loud. Cullibaggy, you can practically hear the fences. They couldn't be more limited if they tried. Elsewhere in the province they're still at it. Killing each other with bombs and guns. The third or fourth summer of this nonsense depends on when you start to keep in count. Most folks are fed up with the whole thing. They're adamant the killing must stop. There's war in Bosnia and Afghanistan. There's a brutal one winding up in Rwanda. You can't turn on your telly for seeing dead bodies piled everywhere. Blood pulling in the gutters. Women howling and getting on. The people here are sick of death. This isn't a third world country. This is Britain. Or this is Ireland. Or both. Or neither. Or its own institution. Peculiwr is a maiden aunt. Either way. It's a civilised country. It's been a whole two years since McDonald's arrived. I have loads more questions springing out of that. But let's get Wendy to read to and then we can enjoy a bit of story and then we'll get into it. Thanks very much. I'm just going to read the start of a story called Memento Mori. This is a story about... What made me write this was... You know seeing those sort of roadside memorials where somebody has died. I'm sort of thinking what would that be like if you had to see that every day if that was outside your house. You were having to cope with your own situation, your own maybe complex personal situation and you had this reminder of death always outside your house. So I wrote a story about two women, Gillian and Tracy, who end up having this outside their house. But I'm just going to start from the very beginning. Gillian I'll tell you is now... She's now in jail. Memento Mori. The books in the library are fairly limited. They may need true crime and thrillers. Every so often Gillian fills in a transfer request for titles of interest and within three or four weeks they come. Most frequently she asks for books about gardens because although there's a small plot here opportunities are limited. In terms of other reading material it usually takes a couple of days before she gets the Sunday paper but she's used to that now. And anyway she focuses so little on the actual news that it wouldn't matter. A paper one week, two weeks old. On the last page of the magazine supplement a woman in response to a problem or supposed difficulty gives circumlocutory and banal advice that spans a number of paragraphs. Tray advice to this person is basically to wise a fuck up in no circumstances it would have been beneficial for the people to take heed. Yet there were times when someone who seemed a prime candidate for harsh pragmatism was treated with a degree of kindness because he or she reminded Tracy of somebody she used to know in London, in Liverpool, in other lives. And so when Gillian eventually does get the Sunday paper on a Tuesday or Wednesday she reads the problem page first and thinks of Tracy. Tracy used to say Gillian, what in the name of God did you do before you met me? It surprised her that Gillian had been with so few people. Gillian always replied that she'd simply been waiting for her. She'd been waiting for Tracy. Thinking now that does seem the way of it. You know, sitting in a cafe in a foreign city watching a young couple in the park in the dark of the cinema or when she had to put down a book because his evocation of some or other passion was so cute she had all along been dreaming of Tracy. Although she'd yet to meet her. Tracy, by contrast, had had plenty of previous partners and even been married once. It's never going to work out. She said, too young, too crazy. Lucky we've got a year and a half out of it. Of all places, a book launch was where they met. Gillian's own friend, Wendy, had written some short stories. The launch took place at a bar down near the docks which had not yet succumbed to anybody's notion of a new Belfast. Wendy and her husband had filled said bar with vases of lilies but still the smell of stew lingered. Gillian was at a table with a rag bag of people, some who worked with her friend, a few neighbours, a taxi driver Wendy regularly used. Although they had all bought the book, dutyfully, they agreed that they didn't read short stories or even like them all that much. Then another person joined them. She said that when Wendy next came in for a blow dry she would just get her to tell the stories and that would save the bother of reading them. Tracy was Wendy's hairdresser. There was dancing upstairs at the launch, prancing about in a pooky room above a pub was the last thing Gillian would enjoy. But that was where Tracy had been. The blonde hair framing her face was damp. She said she had to go because she was working early in the morning and did anyone fancy sharing a taxi? No one did. But Gillian said that she was leaving anyway and that if she wanted she could give Tracy a lift to wherever she needed to go. Thank you. Wendy, I want to say I was at that book launch and I did not meet the love of my life, so I want my money back, please. I'm going to have to write a few more of these books for more launches. I have a couple more wee questions. Then again, we'll come to you. There's going to be two roving mics, I think, and you'll get a chance to ask your questions. What really strikes me from both of those excellent readings is just that both in different ways your abilities to marry comedy and tragedy or really the dark and the light in a single line, in a single story or chapter and make neither the cheaper for it. I'm absolutely transfixed by that as a concept. I just wonder how you do it and why it's important. Wendy first? Well, I think it's really important. I absolutely think it is. I ended up putting at the start of the book, that bit from William Blake, about joy and woe being woven fine, what I'm trying to achieve. But it's never really a schematic thing that I'm thinking, right, there's been a downer for a few paragraphs here, let's put in a couple of jokes. But to me it's just so much to do with how I think life is, that you have got distressing things, so up close to things that are funny, that things can just turn so quickly. I suppose it's exactly what you're saying that I was hoping to achieve, that it can embrace those things, but not cheapen it in any way. I often find books so unfunny as well. I find life on the whole quite laugh a lot of the time. And yet so many books are not all of funny. And I think it's almost a deliberate decision to leave the humour out. Sometimes I think people maybe think it elevates it more. I don't know to leave it out, but I don't think it does. In terms of that up-down though rhythm, does that factor in when you're ordering the stories in a book like Dan's movie? Is that a naive way of thinking about it? Is that a sad or sorry? A bit of levitary or a bit of humour? Or is that not a factor? I honestly don't think there's one of those stories that's any sadder than any other. I'm hoping that all of them in a sense reflect that same sensibility of difficulty and joy in life. I suppose as well. I'm writing a lot of times about very difficult things. So there's abuse. There's murder. There's coercion. There's imprisonment. There's all sorts of things here. And if that's all it is, it becomes just too much for people. So there has to be a likeness and a joy in living at the same time. And so hopefully all of the stories have those elements in them. I don't think there are any that are real downers or any that are like hilarious. I think that they all reflect that same sensibility, Peggy, I think. I would agree. I thought about this a lot. And I don't think, like Wendy, I would never be like, oh, I've just written two very sad sentences. Now I need to make everyone laugh. But I think it's quite an Irish thing. And I thought about this the way well. I think our culture, it has this idea of hospitality at the centre of it. So a lot of Irish people are bent towards putting people at ease all the time. And you'll know this if you've ever got into a lift with an Irish person. We can't stand a silence. You have to talk about the weather. You have to make sure the other person's OK. If you've been to anyone's house, you know that the food keeps coming out and the teapot keeps coming out. It's this constant desire to make sure the other person is at ease. And I think some of that has crept into how we do language and storytelling. OK, I've just told you something really difficult. Are you OK? Are you all right? Do you know what might make you feel better if I get a wee laugh out of you? And I don't even know that we're doing it sometimes, but it's almost like undercutting the really difficult stuff with something that raises the mood and makes the other person feel at ease. So I'm basically saying I think Irish writers are quite generous to their readers often that whether you realise you're doing it or not, there's a subconscious kind of desire to guide a reader through a story that Wendy's talked about that are often about really difficult, desperately hard things, but you're kind of thinking about your reader throughout in a way. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah. I'm reminded by very much Wendy, the writer, being in Wendy's book, not trying to insinuate though you yourself have to be in your books, but I wonder, and Jan first actually, because I know that this book is very close to your upbringing and will have brought a lot of things into sharp focus, I just wonder what made you decide to go there or how you retain the kind of personal boundary in dealing with that kind of material. So The Raptures is the book that I've always wanted to write and no one that I need it to write. It's about evangelical Protestantism, which is the kind of community that born again kind of culture that I grew up in. I grew up in a very conservative rural Presbyterian home all the way through the Aries, sort of under the kind of shadow of Ian Paisley. I haven't seen much art literature film that deals with that world, but it's had a huge shape or huge impact on things like how the politics of Northern Ireland have been formed. To understand the DEP, I think you have to understand a little bit of that world. So I knew I was always going to write about it. I knew it was going to be a painful process. My family are still in that world. So there's always a hesitancy how to go to the honest places that you have to go to without hurting people. So I spent a long time trying to think about what was good about that community as well as what was negative, hypocritical, difficult. So I think there's a fair amount of balance and nuance in the book. And I'll say this before I shut up. I get asked a lot by people who are writing, how do you write about something that is grounded in reality that might hurt a lot of people, but you know you have to write about it? The advice I always give is don't censor when you're writing. Write the first draft like no one else is ever going to read it except you because if you censor as you write you'll get rid of all of the important stuff that needs to be in there. You can go back afterwards and think I'm not going to put that in because that will hurt my grandmother so that's your choice as a writer to do that. What I find is when I had my first honest draft there wasn't that much that I wanted to take out of it. I'd rather live with the implications and start to censor it, but it wasn't an easy process. Anything you want to add, Wendy, in terms of Wendy the writer and what she's doing? Well I'd just like to add that I think Jan's written an absolutely brilliant book and I think as well that it is a community that they're not very visible and that also is well a community that sometimes can be regarded as a bit of a joke almost, you know, which is very, very, very unfair and you know to be able to see the good in a community like that is a really important thing and I think it's a really unusual thing as well in terms of writing from Ireland so I think it's a wonderful book in that respect well in all sorts of respects that respect particularly in terms of my story I just did that for a wee joke because I put myself in that story and that was my launch and so on and I thought one of the things I love in any writing is when very disparate characters come together people from absolutely different worlds I return to that again and again because I love it when it happens to me in real life when you meet somebody that's totally from a different background and you get a glimpse into their life you know I thought I love these two women who are very different and I thought maybe my book launch you know that will do the trick there but in a sense I'm all the people you know if it's not if it's not literally something that's happened to me it's me projecting myself into how certain sorts of things would fail so in a sense you have to kind of you know listen to all of these all of these people here I find that occasionally I write non-fiction and I find that nightmare I find that so difficult just because in a sense the truth always seems to be quite compromised you know I once wrote a thing about my son and he's about 15 or so and I said right I'll give you approval on this and if there's anything you don't want in it I'll take it out and he was just like that all the bits that were gold he wanted it out but that was important to me that I should do that because I didn't want to compromise him at all but at the same time in fiction it's different because it can almost sound very paradoxical but you can kind of be because it's fiction you can kind of get the truth more because you're only accountable to the characters how much as I find them really real they don't actually exist you know thank you Andy we're three Northern Irish women here this all day so it's over to you we would love to hear your comments and questions are we getting the house lights up a wee bit so we can see any hands out there maybe do we have any cans there that we're missing give us a massive wave I'm sure we've got one question London there's one there a good person there if we could get the mic down to here that's lovely thank you and I think we've got one at the back as well let's write down at the front third row red thank you you're great I was reading somewhere that this is the first point in time where like the future seems quite bleak in literature it's always dystopian when it's presented and I just wondered for a Northern Irish novel set in the future in like 2072 what kind of things do you think the characters would be preoccupied with and how would they respond to sort of more global things that are happening like climate change you don't have to wonder there are those novels and it's one of the things I don't know if you know this but a lot of folks who understand sci-fi a lot better than I do will tell you that in a conflict situation one of the signs of recovery is when writers begin to write about the future so you know if you are from a place that has a history of conflict in the midst of it it's very hard to see beyond the image it every day and we've just had an explosion of it's a difficult term in the context of Northern Irish literature but there's an awful lot more speculative science fiction fantasy writing coming out of the north and as you said what they're doing is writing similarly to sci-fi writers all around the world they are looking at the climate change they're looking at gender roles they're looking at power and balance a lot of them that I've seen creating kind of non-specific Northern Irish spaces but there are a few people here who are beginning to write with a kind of very Northern Irish flavour to what they're doing so yeah, watch this space there's a fantastic Northern Ireland sci-fi group you can google and there's a really extensive list of all of the sci-fi and fantasy writers there what's your year again 2072 is that it yeah I imagine by 2072 they don't want to be terribly terribly gloomy but there'll be all sorts of problems that we haven't even conceptualised yet I'm sure there'll be all sorts of terrible directions that life is going to go in but I also think as well people will still be interested in what we have now people will still be interested in being in love with the wrong person the person that they love not being interested in them you know things that have happened to in the past all sorts of traumas I think those will just continue as they always will in literature they'll still be fighting about flags as well yeah probably I do hope not is there any other questions there's one right down on the front row thank you we'll get to you if you just hang on so we can all hear lovely just right here thank you very much there you go this is what I find really interesting about Irish writing and I am from the north of Ireland is language and the context and I think you mentioned something about things you would only hear at home and there's other things that are more widespread I came to London in 1974 and I spent a year trying to make myself understood because of the broad day and then going talking about people at home in the Troubles the Seamus Henning whatever you say saying nothing was you know it was our household because my father worked for the MOD then on a different issue on language looking at Facebook I used to get bored from Facebook regularly for saying shit but now I make comments on the current government and I call them shite.gov.nk but Facebook doesn't recognise shite as a swear word so it gets passed every time so I'm really interested in the whole language thing and I'll see you later in the programme tomorrow there's the Ulysses Arena programme that was at another book festival I think it was at Queen's Park a while back so that again is language and people with different interpretation and I think more so and I think you mentioned it it's the idiom and the vernacular where you say something that will mean something to people here but at home there's a bit of black humour in there so that's one of the things I find really interesting is the language and that's really a great town famous for Liam Neeson I'll say something I think until very recently a lot of us who were using Northern Irish vernacular and stuff there was a real emphasis from publishers coming along that you need to contextualise it put footnotes, explain it and that pissed me off no end because when our daddy Roy writes about India she drops in regional names and street names and food names and pieces of language and I do lots of my favourite writers from around the world so why did we have to do this and I think post Milkman like Anna Burns did us such a favour because Milkman is unapologetically Northern Irish in its language not just the word choice but how she shapes sentence structures and how she tells a story and I think that opened the doors for a lot of publishers to be like they should be able to talk how they actually talk and readers aren't idiots readers understand and they sometimes actually like to learn new words and to hear different language as well so I think Anna did us all a big service with Milkman one of the things that I get slightly nervous about sometimes is sort of I suppose sort of quite essentialist qualities to do with the country and the fact that because you're from the same landmass that you necessarily have you know are going to be riding in the same way as someone who's maybe 400 miles from where you 300 miles from where from where you live so in a sense some of the aspects of language I don't see as essentially Irish I see them as essentially I suppose you would say I don't know if you really use the word region maybe just I don't know non London maybe I don't know so I think maybe some of the issues that we'd say to do with language are also things that somebody like James Kelman would have encountered in Glasgow in terms of the sort of sense of humour I wonder is it so very difficult different you know to somebody who's maybe riding in Liverpool or riding in Manchester so you know it's just one of those things I kind of return to that I'm just not entirely sure about you know people in the same country incredibly diverse people with very very different themes very very different ages all being bound together by some sort of essentialist notions of Irishness in some way fair point Wendy I'm aware we're coming to the close here I've just got one final question for both of you and it's just acknowledging that you have very varied portfolios and interests in lives I mean you're creatively flexing all over the place I just wondered if you could tell us a wee bit about that and what that brings to how that's distilled into the work if it's distilled into the work Wendy first Yes well basically I have a no strategy whatsoever with my career anything anybody's asked me to do that I've found vaguely interesting I've said yes I'll do it and it's been brilliant I've met just such a lot of great people and one of the things that I've been doing recently is I've got a book out with PVA they're called Paper Visual Art they're based in Berlin and Dublin and it's a book called Well I Just Kind of Like It and it's about art in the home and the reason it's called Well I Just Kind of Like It is because you know the idea of people you know feeling a bit self-conscious about talking about art and they're just like well I just kind of like it you know they don't they don't really want to offer some sort of you know art speak you know explanation of it so it has got images from Richard Billingham and it's got images from Kathy Wilkes and wonderful wonderful photographers and artists and it's got all sorts of essays it's a bit like I wanted it to be like you know sort of annual you would have got like Bunt Day or Jackie or whatever you know question crossword on one page of puzzle and then a story it's all sorts of stuff in it so that was a thrill to put together and that's one of my things I've got out at present also got a show on rough trade for rough trade books on Soho Radio that's another wee thing that I do Does that stuff feed the work or is it separate or? Well yeah I suppose like I'm really interested in homes and houses so you know I'm one of those people that if I go to the toilet upstairs in your house they'll probably appear in the bedroom and look in the other rooms just because I'm so rosy and interested in people's houses and how they are but no judgment on messiness or in his own place it's a disgrace but that's that's that's yeah that does feed in it's a total reflection of what I'm interested in as well in the fiction for sure I guess my other big passion in life apart from writing is community arts so I've been involved in the community arts sector since I was at university 24 years ago and increasingly my work a lot of many of you will know this but a lot of the piece money that came to Northern Ireland went into the arts to create spaces where people could come together and get to know each other and create and respect learn to respect each other's stories and that was a joy to be part of that but increasingly my work began to focus on older people and then specifically with folks who are living with dementia so for the last 10 years I've done a lot of community arts practice with people who have dementia and their carers and the systems around that and it culminated in the last two years I got to be part of a big research project at Queens in Belfast looking at how dementia's developed in contemporary fiction which I guess for Peggy's question about how does it inform your work it was like both my worlds coming together and we looked at 100 novels that have dementia as a narrative in them we worked with people who have dementia carers and social workers to work out you know how realistic the depictions were what were the features of the language that was used it was a wonderful experience and off the back of that I was able to give the research findings and the experience to 14 Irish and British writers and commissioned 14 new stories that were dementia narratives so we published in September from New Island a book called A Little Unsteadily Into Light which is just the most beautiful title I think it's Stedge Directions from Craps Last Tape A Little Unsteadily Into Light but I think for me it sums up the folks that I know that are living as well as they possibly can with a desperately difficult situation you can't undermine either side it is a really difficult thing to live with dementia but I also don't want to downplay the fact that some people I know are living bold, brilliant, wonderful lives with the condition so we want to acknowledge both things and we're very delighted because on Thursday a Little Connor story this small giddy life won the Irish short story of the year so it's one of the first stories in the collection so if you would like to find out a little bit more about that project there are essays explaining the research work and then 14 really fantastic short stories in the collection as well Lovely, well there are two other books for your list as well as these two wonderful books I hope we've convinced you to come and check them out over at the main concourse I honestly couldn't recommend them more highly I'd like to thank you all in the room for coming I'd like very much to thank and maybe wave at the people who are at home and online with us and I'd like to ask you to please join me and thank you very much, Wendy Erskine and Jen Petty