Interview with Lucy Caldwell
Interview
Jillian
I'm in the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast with Lucy Caldwell before the launch of her new collection of short stories Openings. She is the winner of numerous awards including the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her second short story collection Intimacies and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her last novel These Days, which is based in Belfast during the 1941 Blitz. She is the author of four Novels, three collections of short stories and numerous plays and radio dramas in her twenty-year career so far.
Welcome back to Belfast, Lucy - although it seems to me you are back here pretty often. Is it still ‘home’?
Lucy
Yes, I still call it home. I live in England now with my husband and children but my parents still live in the house I grew up in here in Belfast
Jillian
You went to Strathearn School in East Belfast and I believe that Wendy Erskine was your 6th form teacher?
Lucy
That's right. The age difference between us isn't that much – she was newly qualified at the time. When I was 16 in 1997 she walked into the mobile classroom one day with her Pulp Fiction fringe. She wore a dress over her trousers which in 1997 was different for Belfast. She opened up so much of Irish literature to me. One day she brought in her own copy of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and gave it to me because she said she thought I should read it. She was absolutely brilliant and we stayed in touch after I left school. It has been one of the privileges of my life to edit and publish one of her stories in Being Various in 2019.
Jillian
Did you start to write when you were at school?
Lucy
I started writing before I even went to school. I would fold up sheets of paper to look like a book and I would draw the pictures. Since having children myself, I've seen just how creative children naturally are and how easy it is to encourage and nurture that from an early age.
I teach creative writing for all stages from beginners to PhD level, and often come across people who lacked the support from parents or teachers and who feel they missed out. They didn't have that friendly librarian to encourage them! There is an essential part of creativity that is expressed by writing. I'm just so grateful for the encouragement I got.
My mum used to take us up to Tullycarnet Library three times a week and we got to choose 9 books at a time. I read my way through literally all the children's books. The librarian helped me choose books and teachers at school recommended books to me as well.
It was a gift to have people round me, to take me seriously. Like the brilliant playwright Chris Hammond who would discuss my early theatre scenes intensely and took my writing so seriously. It allowed me to believe in myself.
Jillian
You mentioned theatre there. You've written a lot of plays and radio dramas. Are you still doing those?
Lucy
I always did both at the same time. I've found in recent years it's impossible to get plays commissioned but I'm still doing radio. I love the intimacy of it. You know you're literally the voice in someone’s ear. We put in our earbuds to create a bubble and shut out the world for a while.
Jillian
Your early life here in Belfast has provided a lot of inspiration for your writing -does it still influence you?
Lucy
Edna O’Brian always says that the most important years for a writer are the first seven years, but in some ways I disagree with that. I think so much of my own writing has been influenced by my later life, by having children, so if you stop me at age 7 I wouldn’t have any of those later experiences.
But there is such a well in those first and formative experiences. They are the things that colour and shape your life. It’s just so important for all children to have access to libraries and to art, drama and to music.
Jillian
You mentioned becoming a parent and that's obviously been big influence in your short stories – specially your short story collection Intimacies.
Lucy
I wrote short stories for 10 years before any of them were worth anything. It's very easy to write a mediocre short story. The ones I wrote would occasionally flicker, but they would never come to life. Then, I began to see them as prose narratives and not as sort of anecdotes. The stories became words and rhythms in a particular order that provoked a particular sensation. That’s what made them come alive. It coincided with me having children. I'd always wanted children, but I was worried that it would be the end of any artistic life that I would have.
I had a difficult time with my son when he was born, but coming through that made me feel fearless, like I’d touched the veil between life and death. I spent so much time previously trying to protect myself from the publicity that came with being published young but realized after that wasn’t what was important. That emotional fearlessness fed into the urge to write and helped me to use what little writing time I had to be as creative and productive as possible. I started writing my best then.
Jillian
Where do you get inspiration for your short stories?
Lucy
From everyday lives, from everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. There’s a famous story by Chekhov - he was asked by a journalist ‘Where do you get the stories from?’ Chekhov looked down at his desk, picked up the first thing he saw, which was an ashtray, and said, ‘See this ashtray?’ Come back tomorrow and I'll have a story for you- based on his ashtray.
Sometimes for me, the story seems almost a byproduct of my interest in the world. Like with my new collection, there's a story that’s set in Berlin, there's a story set in Marakesh, and I went to CERN in Switzerland. I went 90 metres underground into the Large Hadron Collider, to talk to scientists working in dark matter to research for one of the stories.
Jillian
So tell me how your award winning novel These Days came about – I believe it was written during COVID?
Lucy
Yeah, that's right. These Days started in a strange way. At the time, my son was obsessed with this book called Peepo by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. I had to read that book every night for months – it’s written against the backdrop of the London Blitz. We were living at the time in East London in a building, a flat, in the converted warehouse which was one of the only original buildings standing on that street - the Docklands had been badly bombed. I knew there had been a Belfast Blitz and started to gather stories and collecting material. The Belfast Blitz was between April to May 1941, which overlaid almost exactly with our first Lockdown in 2020. We were in central London with constant ambulance sirens, and it made me think of the people living through the Blitz in that way wondering how long it would last, putting their life on hold like we were. Suddenly I was writing that novel -it became a way of plotting how people survived the blitz. I wrote the first draft, very intensively, almost in real time. My husband was at home because of Covid, and so we split the working day. The mornings are always my best time to write, so I had him to look after the children until lunchtime everyday.
With a novel you just need to start, to plot, to wear it day after day. You need that regular rhythm for it to grow - it kind of turns to ashes if you don’t pay attention to it – and it just worked in that space and time.
Jillian
Are you working on something new now?
Lucy
I have been working on more stories recently, and I'm adapting one of the stories of Openings - it's been commissioned as a feature film. So I'm doing my first feature length screenplay. That's exciting.
Jillian
Very exciting! Tell me about Openings, is there a central theme to the collection?
Lucy
It is very much part of the same project as Multitudes and Intimacies. But Multitudes is very tightly focused on Belfast girlhood and Intimacy is focused on motherhood. With Openings I felt that I had more technical range and the stories are more diverse. The title story Openings is about the complicated solace the narrator finds in converting to Islam. What they do have in common is the changing relationships within families and how they grow with time. If there is a theme going through the collection, it might be the ways that our lives can ossify and the ways that they can open up, kind of miraculously.
Jillian
Hence the title Openings.
Well, I wish you all best with this book and with what you're working on at the minute. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. I've really enjoyed it.
Lucy
Thank you.
