Set to be released on February 17th, Dance Move is the second short story collection to be published from award-winning East Belfast author Wendy Erskine.
A teacher at Strathearn School, Wendy came to wider attention when she released her first collection, Sweet Home , in 2018.
Since its was released - to great acclaim - Wendy has been one of a number of authors who has exemplified the strength of good writing in Northern Ireland.
Her second book is as good, if not better, than her first.
Dance Move is a collection brimming with odd pairings, unusual situations, and individuals who cope with longing, confinement, loneliness or desperation. A cleaner finds a young child abandoned in a rented room; a woman and her temporary lodger try to work out what to do about a gun which is hidden in the attic; and an aged musician is asked to perform an obscure hit from his repertoire for a paramilitary commemoration.
In each of these stories, Wendy gets to the heart of what makes people human and vulnerable.
Already being hailed as brilliant follow-up to her first book, Wendy told us that she's excited to finally see it get released.
"I am really looking forward to getting it out there," she said. "It's always funny with these things because I've lived with these stories and these characters for a lot longer than anyone else, and it's strange to see them being put there, but I'm looking forward to hearing what people think of them."
Work on Dance Move started after Wendy's first collection was published, she told us, and that the lockdowns of the last two years provided her with an opportunity to really get stuck into them.
"These stories came after Sweet Home . It was published in 2018 and immediately after it was out I did a lot of other types of writing for a while. I wrote anything that anyone asked me to do, really. I wrote some non-fiction. I wrote about art - all sorts of things.
"Then I also wrote a couple of stories that were for radio. So two of the stories from this collection were originally for radio. Then from 2020 on, I thought, 'Right OK, let's start writing some more stories in earnest'. Lockdown gave me an opportunity to do more writing. It seems dreadful saying that when it was such a challenge for everyone, but it did give me such a flexibility."
Much of the praise for Wendy's writing stems from how she writes about seemingly ordinary people and the fascinating, complex, sometimes troubled lives they live beyond the surface. All of the characters in this book are people you wouldn't think about twice after passing on the street, yet their personal situations are absolutely captivating.
"People have amazing lives," Wendy said. "It sounds like a bit of a cliché, but it's true of everyone, without exception. People have said that these books are about ordinary people, and in some ways that's true, because I'll write a lot about the kind of everyday routines and systems that people have. But then when you look at it, what seems like ordinary people on the surface is actually people who are having to deal with extraordinary things; like children being abandoned, murder, abuse, paramilitary death squads, relationship breakdowns - these aren't gentle little stories about gentle little things. People's lives are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary."
The settings themselves speak to that mix of the ordinary and extraordinary (especially in a Northern Irish context). There's a Christian Film Festival in here, a paramilitary do, and a wedding anniversary at a posh, Malone-esque mansion. For Wendy, the variety of life in Belfast is a source of endless fascination.
"Some people have said to me, 'Do you think you'll be able to move on from Belfast? Or even east Belfast?' and I kind of think, 'Why would I do that?' There's a richness here. I don't think people live more complex lives elsewhere than they do here, I think people live very complex lives here. These stories can deal with all different sorts of people, all different sorts of backgrounds, people who seem ostensibly like one thing but are in fact something else. There's a richness there that will always be interesting to me."
Wendy's stories are at their most profound and moving when they focus on how people deal with desperate situations. In particular, the theme of loneliness, or of people being cut adrift - from friends, or family, or society in some way - is a consistent one in this collection.
"I think, just generally, I'm always going to be interested in the people who things aren't quite working out for. I'm never going to be writing too many stories about incredibly popular people who feel very fulfilled in their jobs and have amazing families and friends, because I don't think I'd be drawn to those people in real life even. I think I'll always be drawn to people who are on the periphery of things.
"I am interested in loneliness. I'm interested in the kind of people who feel isolated in one way or another. What's coming to my head right now is that corny line from the Cher song, 'Sooner or later we all sleep alone'. I think there's such a truth in that, and that a lot of the people in these stories are lonely and isolated and deal with it in different ways. Some are content with being alone and others find it difficult."
Such are Wendy's powers with creating her characters and depicting their vulnerable sides that there are times when the reader almost wants to look away from them making a bad decision or doing something embarrassing. In one story, a woman loses her partner and, in her grief, reacts angrily - and even violently - when a vigil for a different deceased person pops up right in front of her property.
Wendy said: "People were telling me that there were times where they felt like they were looking in on someone in this intensely intimate state, someone who's doing something that was very painful or embarrassing.
"For me, it's all about character. I know that for some writers, character isn't the crucial thing, but for me it absolutely is. The characters that I like to write are ones who maybe do things which are unwise, or embarrassing or slightly cringey. And to produce a complex character, you need to always show that."
In the first story in the collection, 'Mathematics', a cleaner named Roberta discovers a young girl alone in a rented room, who tells that she's there "waiting for her mum". Determined not to leave her alone, the two form an unusual bond, but throughout the story the reader has a foreboding sense of something being terribly wrong with how the situation came to be. It features both brilliantly rendered characters and a tense, excellent plotline. What comes first for Wendy when she writes a story?
"It's so different each time," she said, "but with that story, I just simply started off by thinking about the people that go in to clean hotel rooms and what they find; what's left of the people that've been there.
"But my main way of working is that I'll just get to know the characters. That's me at the beginning, just thinking and thinking and thinking about them. So it's me saying, 'OK, let's imagine there's this girl called Roberta, and she's cleaning these rooms', and it all starts from there. Then, without even writing anything down, I'm just imagining her and getting to know her.
"Then what I'm going to say next will sound a bit Mystic Meg, but if I've spent enough time getting to know a character, I end up being led a bit by them and what they would do, and that generates things like a plot and a theme.
"Then once I've got that, I'll write a massive draft - maybe 18,000 words for a 6,000 word story. And it's fun doing that, because you don't know where it's going, you write whatever you feel like. Then afterwards you read it and think, 'Ok what're the really interesting things that are happening in this story?' And you edit.
"So you would do that long draft first and then things would come into focus. I'd realise what's important, what's not important, and the final draft - the story that you get - would be about a third of the length."
Many have asked it in interviews with Wendy before - but how difficult is it to juggle full-time teaching with writing?
"I just try to be quite disciplined," she said. "Sometimes it's quite easy to be disciplined because I find writing to be kind of a high. When you finish one, and you think it's reasonably ok, it's an incredible high. And if you're maybe writing one story a month, it can be very satisfying.
"So once I'm into the writing of it, I would just be happy to spend hours and hours and hours on it. At the same time, I know that I can get so utterly absorbed in the process that I know it can be irritating for other people! These characters are constantly on my mind, and sometimes even my kids will say that they're speaking to me and I can't hear them because I'm so focused on these other worlds in my head."
Wendy has received international acclaim with her work and her books have been translated into different languages, as well as having won awards. Having only started writing seriously at the age of 48, how does she process the last few years and the success she's found during them?
"I just feel very lucky," she told us. "I just feel extremely lucky. It was only by chance that I started writing. I was on social media and saw a course for The Stinging Fly [a Dublin-based literary magazine which runs courses in prose and poetry].
"I would always have written things, but it was only for my own amusement. Around 2010 I started my own blog. I thought I'd be writing book reviews and music reviews, and then I realised it was really difficult to do that. I was doing dopey things really, like writing as if I was Brian Wilson's girlfriend in the '60s, things like that. Looking back, it was a kind of creative flex, but it only bits and pieces and I wasn't serious about it.
"So it was by pure chance that I saw that Stinging Fly course and got myself writing short stories. If it hadn't been for them I wouldn't have had anything published whatsoever. So I just feel very lucky with the way the whole thing has panned out."
Not many students can say that their teacher is a successful author. Is it ever difficult to negotiate the roles of being a teacher by day and an award-winning author by night?
"You know it's not, really, because I think that so many people have so many dimensions to them. We've all got these different existences that are part of us. You maybe have a teacher who's also an incredibly gifted sports star. Or someone who's got success in some arena but then they've got three little kids that they're looking after. I mean I could come off this interview and be told, 'You've been shortlisted for some award', and the next minute my son might say to me, 'What's for our tea?' So I suppose work's a bit like that as well. But I will say that my work have been so, so supportive and I couldn't have done all this without them being so helpful."
Wendy's first collection was published just a few months before North Belfast writer Anna Burns won the Booker Prize for her troubles novel, Milkman , which went on to sell almost a million copies.
Since then, it feels like the conversation around how great Northern Irish writing is has never stopped. Does Wendy feel like it's in a good place at the minute.
"I think it's really amazing," she said, "and I think the effect of that will be that more and more people will be wanting to write. Once people see how varied the writing is and how all types of people can manage to do it and find a readership, it'll be encouraging for someone else. If you look around, you've got someone like Darren McNulty doing nature writing, then you've got someone like Susannah Dickey doing something completely different. And rather than people being limited to a specific type of writing, there's an incredible variety out there."
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