GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Sonya Gildea
‘A 1000 hours a day…’ is such a powerful story, a small snatch of time on a local bus journey – one that should be everyday and utterly prosaic, but threatens, quite suddenly, to turn into something else. Can you tell our readers a bit more about it – its setting, the focus, how the idea came to you and how you set about writing it?
Thanks so much, Eloise and Sam, for such great and such thoughtful questions.
The story, as written, opens in the first few words with the rifle moving to her friend’s face. The story is told, in its way, outward from that point – while the rifle is held there. I am asking the reader if they would both suspend time there with these two people on a bus, while also unknitting the timeline outward and into a constellation of points in the journey that brought them precisely here.
I’d been circling this story, in the round, for a long time. In some ways, these are often (perhaps counter intuitively) ever-broadening circles. Coming back off the thing and walking around it, and around it until, in some curious way, you feel you are at the furthest away point. And then, dropping yourself (or – myself in this case) into its middle and somehow writing from there.
I think – most often – a story for me starts in the centre and writes its way outward. Not, I suppose, that it should read like that in terms of time line and sequential logic, but that it should feel like that – like memory does, perhaps. I like, however difficult, trusting the not knowing part.
There is often a point when I’m at the furthest circling, that I’m drawing things – sight unseen – into my thinking. There’s no apparent logic to this. It only ever makes itself clear in retrospect. With this story, at that furthest point, I was in Croatia in what was then 36 degree heat and was immersed in reading Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti – snow falling on Belfast city, winter cold, the poetry of geography. I was also reading Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses and had been reading Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home. I saw no pattern in this, but in retrospect, this was all in the last stage before some quietness happens. Which in turn, for me, is in advance of the writing. Of course, the reading I had been doing makes loose and lovely sense to me now.
One of the things that we talked about in the judging meeting is way that you deftly negotiate different understandings of social codes – in particular, fashion, how clothes are worn and who is wearing them – and how a simple misunderstanding over something so simple as a pair of boots can quickly escalate. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
The clothes and fashion are, of course, secondary to the music. I think music here, in this instance, is intrinsic to the fashion it might demonstrate. Together they are an inseparable code of understanding. One represents the other, vitally, visually and in some way, I think, wordlessly.
Importantly, the real making of the story for me, is that both the music and those who are aligned with and loyal to it, form part of a (much more interesting) unifying counter culture.
In this case, that is specifically set against the Irish border at the end of a time when it was actively and militarily patrolled. Though, of course, it could be any border, at any time, across any nation or group of nations, and any band of young people who together create and share such a vital counter culture.
Here, this is a counter culture which in its potency, its urgency, its language and code carries itself right across these complicated islands of ours. In one way, it simply removes borders and nationhood. In this story it was setting that exactly at a border checkpoint in a moment suspended, that interested me most. Though, it took me some time to understand that that was what I was after.
The music that this young person seeks out and lives by belongs to those who are older and came before. For instance, Magazine’s ‘The Light Pours out of Me’, The Clash (possibly, ‘Straight To Hell’), and of course, if you were to continue singing (or humming) along with the title of the story after the ellipsis, you’d hear Robert Smith finishing the line ‘... just to feel my heart for a second ...’. I think there’s a decision to be made with music like this: liking it, listening to it, is not accidental. Though, in its way, it is/was wholly subversive. So, that is rich, rich ground that draws me back again and again in the writing.
I’m just now finishing a full collection of stories, and at a certain point realised that I very often seem to root a story, or perhaps how a story feels, in a song, in music. An album, perhaps, and the time that made it.
If I had a wish here, it would be that a reader might either recognise themself in the music (and therefore a greater, richer hinterland that is, of course, shared), or if they’re new to the music, that they might seek it out, and hear it afresh.
Language and form is an important element of ‘A 1000 hours a day…’, with the staccato, disjointed sentences mirroring the mounting tension and panic. Is this something that came to you straightaway, or did you have to work to find that?
I was talking very recently with Wendy Erskine about this exactly, and that unschooled instinct to write the actual prose of a piece – its sentences, the way that the narrator presents the shape of the thing, the language of it – within, or as closely aligned with, the voice of character as you can. And to somehow do that, or seek to do that, invisibly.
It’s funny, it isn’t always the most straightforward thing, but it is always interesting. The choices, the decisions, the pull against it and the need for it.
In this story, apart from sustaining a certain tension, as you say, I think it might also be a sense of how an incident is remembered and re-remembered by this young person with economy, brevity, in images, and not – as is her way – in full sentences.
I wonder too if it is, in part, also wanting to bring your reader in to the world of the story while (somehow) getting yourself out of their way.
Mostly, I like not to think about any of this. And first see what emerges by instinct in the person’s voice.
Tell us a bit more about your wider writing, too. How long have you been writing for? Do you have a routine?
I do have a routine, though it isn’t set and can shift about in response to some things that might need to be done, for instance, submissions and applications that are time specific. However, my perfect day is a quiet start, a quiet house. I have a small study, if there is morning light and a clear sky, that’s just great. Warmth. Good tea, or coffee, and then a silence in the house, and (bizarrely, though I’ve no say in this) on the street outside.
If there is new work being made, it takes place in the morning until early or mid-afternoon. Rare that new work is made after this time. I work slowly. As I mentioned earlier, with a story like this, I can keep it in my mind’s eye for a long time (a year, possibly two…) and write it, for whatever unknowable reason when it’s ready, in a short week.
I redraft. And redraft. But need significant time in-between drafts to make the most use of them.
You write poetry too, and have had some beautiful photography published. How do these artforms complement your story writing? (If they do!)
This feels like an impossible question to me. My brain scrambles in the face of it!
I wonder are these three disciplines – in their very distinctly different ways – the same thing?
I think with poetry and prose, with short form work and with fiction, there are different things asked of you in each case.
I think – perhaps – what these three disciplines have most in common for me is the way they work with time, time as material, or subject matter. Stilling it, holding it, snagging it, disrupting it, questioning it, reframing it, drawing it. Reshaping it.
I think the discipline of a poem is that everything matters. And the happening of the poem takes place while the poem is happening. As a reader, it is, in its own curious way, a live event. Maybe that is the thing to strive for and toward. I am, in this, a novice.
I have what might be considered a fairly oppressive photographic archive. Unruly, untended and, I feel, in waiting. I have always taken pictures. Sometimes, very seriously. Sometimes, as a place-holder for something I haven’t seen or figured out yet. I am – I think – circling this too.
I am, just now, at the closing stages of work on a final manuscript, The Switching Yard, which will be a first collection of stories.
Tell us about some writers and other artists who you admire, and / or inspire you.
This too is one of the hardest questions.
Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Colm Tóibín – for their mastery, the reach and range in the work.
Sam Shepard’s way with short stories: the beauty in loss, in disappointment. Likewise, Ray Carver.
Peter Orner’s startling way with short stories, with the form, and with quietly disrupting the form.
Alice Oswald for such precision, such accuracy in beauty and in intention. Denise Riley, Fiona Benson, the same.
Wendy Erskine, for the rightness of a story, its relaxed urgency, its inevitability, for its fierce intelligence, its mercy, its timing, for something that opens us out and out.
John McGahern for the way the thing lands in quietness, in all that growing space. Munro too in this regard.
Edward Said’s Out of Time feels, in some way, like memory to me. Or, the way you might make memory.
Anne Enright, for rigour, timing, intellect – and the way in which she will always, always, bring the greater conversation forward.
There are countless, countless others.
I have an exceptional army of poet and writer friends here in Dublin, in Belfast and all across this island. People making new work, forging new ways of making work, searching, looking, thinking, questioning. I’m lucky, beyond measure, to be among them.
How do you relax?
This made me howl laughing! I’ve never been asked this.
Reading, mostly, is meditative.
I like – more than anything – going to and being on islands. I like everything about how this feels. Far flung, weather beaten islands. We have many islands off the west coast in Ireland, but I like – if it is in any way possible – to visit one wherever I happen to be.
The sea, the sound of it and the light on it. I live near the sea here.
I like driving and music. Together, they’re the perfect combination. I also like to think on trains.
I love to wash windows (!), which makes some friends very happy.
And I love falling asleep in a hammock, on a warm day. This – given our weather – is rare enough, but still, not impossible.
I love to sit around unrushed with good friends.
Finally, a fantasy literary dinner. Who would you invite, where would it be, and what would you eat? (Any awkward moments?)
Who:
Could I go for Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Peter Orner, Wendy Erskine, the exceptional David Naimon, Sam Shepard, Per Petterson, Rachel Long, Alice Oswald (— and myself). Twelve in total.
Where:
I think some rambling big house overlooking the Irish Atlantic. Great music. I’ll make a playlist. Lots of different and interesting things to drink.
What to eat:
I think it would have to be a kind of never ending selection of small dishes and tapas arriving magically because the talking, and the laughing, would make eating at length almost impossible. (I’m always happy with falafels.)
Awkward moments?
No, but there’d be much to discuss passionately, to dispute, and to take to task. There might have to be dancing (the music will be so good). Perhaps it needs to be a weekend.