Dance Move: Wendy Erskine

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She adds: "With the story Nostalgie [starring the aforementioned faded pop star, Drew Lord Haig], I was thinking about what happens if people take up your work as meaning something particular to them, which perhaps you find really abhorrent – as has happened with Bruce Springsteen and Born In The USA." The stories in this collection (while all linked through some common thread of Ireland as either a setting or some kind of tie) are extremely varied, which for me ended up being its biggest strength. Range. Each story felt so distinct from the last with such unique and pleasing premises that almost always paid off in a genuinely satisfying (and different way) each time. Always subtle, with just enough to make me really ache over them. Erskine certainly knows how to end a story, and I can’t emphasise enough how rare this actually is. Both my favourite stories ‘Nostalgie’ and ‘Bildungsroman’ achieved this the best and it’s why I couldn’t help but love them so much. Erskine also seems particularly adept at writing good solid characters, all of whom were not only interesting but always intensely believable. Sadly, one amusing detail of this real life episode somehow did not make it into the fictionalised version:

There is also plenty of the comedy-drama that marked out Sweet Home. Max and Gloria, my favourite story, is an hilariously understated put-down of a woke academic in the area of film studies via his encounter with a worker from an old folks’ home. Again, though, there is another story. I wondered if I was covering the same ground or the same ideas again. Initially, that was a bit off-putting, because I would stop and I would start – and then you just realise that there's no point thinking like that otherwise no-one would ever do anything.I read Wendy Erskine’s first collection of short stories Sweet Home in 2019. This latest collection carries on where the last selection left off. I’m a fan of Erskine’s writing though the same old caveat about short stories persists with me. The ones that are really good leave me wanting more character development and a slower burn.

Not that the Belfast-based author is bothered by such opinions: "I enjoy doing them – so I've just done more of them," she says of her brand new collection, Dance Move. Published tomorrow by The Stinging Fly, this features 11 memorable new tales teeming with an eclectic selection of authentically drawn characters who inhabit a variety of tangibly described worlds.Wendy Erskine’s debut short story collection Sweet Home was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciouness Prize, perhaps the UK and Ireland’s finest literary award, a prize for which this year (2022) Erskine is a judge. For me, Wendy Erskine is the new voice of Northern Ireland and I can’t wait for her next collection!

This is my first experience of Wendy Erksine's short stories set in Northern Ireland, and I can only marvel at her abilities to capture people, painting authentic pictures of their characters with so few words and the wide range of circumstances they find themselves in, including within families, their pasts, traumas, feelings, relationships, the unexpected, the tragedies, the idiosyncratic, and the joys. She has a real ear for dialogue, there is dark humour and humanity in her astutely observed, unvarnished and insightful writing. Despite the short length of the stories, Erskine had me totally immersed in the worlds she creates, and the characters and scenarios she imagines. Memento Mori, the most stunning piece here, brings everything in Erskine’s formidable repertoire together for maximal impact. Her fondness for wrongfooting the reader gains force once it becomes clear where the protagonist, Gillian, shown taking mindfulness classes, actually is at the time of telling. The story turns on a doorstep killing that takes place with improbable timing right outside her home as she’s caring for her terminally ill partner, Tracey; it’s easily powerful enough on its own terms, yet there’s an unmistakable satirical force, too, in how the story pits the imperatives of public commemoration against the needs of private grief. Daring, funny, heartbreaking and, like everything else here, out and out entertainment, not to be missed. I heard Wendy Erskine speak at the Irish Writers Weekend in London (26.11.2022). In conversation she said: Dance Move, the second collection by the Belfast-based writer Wendy Erskine, comprises eleven short stories – little snapshots of life with all its minor dramas and incidents. While several other reviewers love this book, praising the stories for their humanity, authenticity and colour, sadly I found it somewhat uneven as a whole. On the positive side, there are five or six very solid stories here – memorable, highly relatable pieces that made a strong impression on me. These are the stories that I’ll focus on in my review, with a few brief notes on the less satisfying ones towards the end. In the poignant His Mother, Sonya scours the city, systematically removing any ‘missing persons’ posters of her son, Curtis, who has now been found dead. These images are tragic reminder of a life unlived, a sense of potential snuffed out.WE gets to know her characters as the story develops and takes on a momentum of its own – ‘it’s a bit Doris Stokes’. The example of the title story given to the collection is a case in point. In Dance Moves the mother is not able to move with the times. WE hadn’t initially seen that connection See Gumble Yard's excellent review for an overview of each story: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... First, I always write a draft that's really really long – maybe 20,000 words," explains Erskine, who embarked on her career as an acclaimed short story writer after enrolling in a weekly creative fiction course offered by respected Dublin-based literary organisation The Stinging Fly – now her Irish publisher. Having maintained her teaching career in parallel with her writing, the Belfast author explains why she gets just as much out of being an educator as a creative.

You kind of need to be flexible, to kind of let the story work itself out as opposed to me being really schematic from the start."I've been a teacher since 1993 and I really, really enjoy it as a job," enthuses Erskine, who taught English in Glasgow and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne before moving home to Belfast in the late 1990s.