The title is key to any short story collection as it unlocks the writer’s preoccupations. For this collection, the titular story Marching Season felt strong, but I primarily chose it because it refers to the Orange flute-band parades from April to August and is therefore contentious. Evocative and provocative. Marching Season is synonymous in many people’s minds with potential trouble, but is a joyous musical road trip for others. I love that one phrase can be so divisive and it sums up Northern Ireland perfectly in a year of Brexit and riots.
Marching Season is my fifth collection and that might sound prolific to some, but in comparison to the greats it’s paltry. The short story writers I admire were mentally fecund and make contemporary specialists such as Claire Keegan look like dabblers. One of the most exceptionally prolific was Guy de Maupassant who wrote a whopping two to four volumes annually of short stories, not to mention his novels. F Scott Fitzgerald died at 44 and still managed to have more than 160 short stories published. Among the Irish writers, William Trevor wrote 13 short story collections while the genius Mary Lavin superseded him with 19.
Kevin Barry considers very few of his short stories worthy of publication: “I would say out of every 10 I try, one or two will ever get outside the door”, but even bearing in mind that he may have said this in order to seem a perfectionist (and all of us writers are prone to self-mythology), it surprised me as I’ve found the more you write, the more confident you become. Let’s be honest – if you were only 10 to 20 per cent successful in most jobs, you’d be sacked! And why wouldn’t you want to emulate the former masters of the form? To be prolific, you mustn’t be too precious about your work.
The biggest question aside from choosing the title is how many stories a collection should include. Trevor favoured 12 and Lucy Caldwell favours 11, but I’m not at all prescriptive. The mainstream school of thought is that collections should be slimline like poetry, as if to imply a rarified art-form, but I’m all for a bulkier approach. Marching Season has 13 short stories, 13 being my lucky number as my brother was born on the 13th, as was my niece.
This connection is especially fitting as Marching Season is a family collaboration. When I was talking to Alan Hayes of Arlen House last year, I told him that my mum had been an artist. Alan loved the idea of an art/short story fusion, so this collection carries 16 of her paintings and memorialises her talent. The front cover is also personal as it was painted by a delightfully mad Russian artist I went out with in Prague.
As for the stories, most were written before Covid, but a few, such as Irish-Australian and What Happened to You, were written during lockdown when I kept dreaming of foreign travel. Lockdown made me talk to myself more but I often think the true recompense for a writer’s loneliness comes from the priceless observations that can only be made during solitude.
Sexual desire is a big theme in Marching Season in differing forms and permutations. I’m fascinated by hedonism as a form of self-escape and my characters are often aesthetes and epiphanists. Dr Caroline Magennis recently made a tongue-in-cheek observation in Writing After the Troubles that I “might be dubbed Belfast’s pleasure laureate” and, funnily enough, I’ve often thought I should ask for sponsorship from Carlsberg and Durex! The opening story, The a, b and c’s of Modern Living, commemorates the days when we could commingle freely in pubs, but one of the darker narratives, Life is Short and Fun Should be Had, centres on our lockdown reality of cyber-dating and the paranoiac distrust it engenders. Other stories are about the jealousy arising from a threesome, a controlling relationship, sexual confusion, youthful longing and a fantasy that goes wrong.
So far, so universal, but I couldn’t call the collection Marching Season without dealing with the sceptred part of this isle. In the title story, a drag queen, Marcus, is alienated from those who march the Queen’s highway, prompting his last-ditch effort to belong. Portrait of a European City is based on a real incident where a Sinn Féin MLA attended an East Belfast art exhibition without local paramilitary clearance.
The story reflects the current culture wars wherein politicians use the arts for their own political gain and it also highlights the East as the current creative hotbed of Belfast. In the surge of new Protestant writing, it’s possible I can be tempted at times to out-Protestant other writers, but I’ve never considered myself a mouthpiece for one particular side. For instance, The Night they Shot the Journalist is about republicans in Derry and is inspired by the murder of Lyra McKee. I don’t need to be something to write about it; I just need to know and feel something.
Autobiography doesn’t so much play a part in Marching Season as a leading role. It’s the “petits faits vrais” that enable writing to soar. In Future-Proof Your Life (Step 7 of 10), I recalled my excruciating lapses of memory during a Tedx talk at Stormont. The best thing about being a writer is that you can write about your disasters until they become paradoxically more valuable than your achievements. Failure in life should always be mined for literary success.
I try to write every story like it’s my first and every line like it’s my last. Lasting work is what counts and real writers don’t want 15 minutes of fame; we want 15 millennia of fame. Reaching my fifties hasn’t made me a better writer, but it’s made me a more focused writer and there’s nothing that concentrates the mind more than the sense of contracting time.
William Trevor called the short story “an impressionist painting” and “an explosion of truth”. To me, writing a story is like having sex with a stranger in the dark; you have a vision of what could happen, but you have to feel your way through it. Trevor also said that stories are “concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness”, and after I’ve finished a story, I’ll begin the delicate process of scoring out words, sentences or whole paragraphs. To return to Trevor’s analogy of the painting, editing is like rubbing out the pencil marks of the initial rough sketch. The final story should be an image, a little nebulous around the edges, but utterly transparent and transfixing at its core.
Ultimately, I see a short story writer as a prose writer with a poet's soul, a metaphorist, a symbolist. John Banville made me laugh when he recently admitted that 'writing a novel is like wading through wet sand, at night, in a storm.' I'm glad to say writing Marching Season was no long sapping march through the sand. Because of the brevity of form, short stories are freeing to write and I stepped lightly all the way.
Marching Season is published by Arlen House
