The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Author and Playwright Lucy Caldwell on Identity, Art, and Belonging
In this episode, I chat with Lucy Caldwell about contemporary Irish literature's vibrant yet complex landscape, her latest novel, These Days, and profound philosophical insights. Growing up in Belfast during the Troubles in a "mixed marriage" family—Protestant father, Catholic mother—Caldwell developed a unique perspective that informs her award-winning writing.
Lucy describes writing during the pandemic and experiencing "a portal between worlds" as she researched the Blitz while living through COVID lockdowns.
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three previous novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for “All the People Were Mean and Bad.” Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and in 2019, she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. In 2022, she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for her body of work to date.
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 288. Before I introduce you to this week's guest, a quick reminder that this Thursday, april 10th, I'll be in conversation with author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes at the Santa Barbara Club in Santa Barbara, california. This event is part of the Santa Barbara Lunch with an Author Literary Series and requires a reservation and prepayment. To find out more about these events, you can go to my website at mandyjacksonbeverlycom. Forward slash events. I look forward to introducing you to some fabulous authors for 2025 at the Santa Barbara Club in Santa Barbara, california. Okay, let's get on with this week's episode.
Speaker 1:Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three previous novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and three collections of short stories. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for All the People Were Mean and Bad Short Story Award in 2021 for All the People Were Mean and Bad. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and in 2019 she was the editor of being Various New Irish Short Stories. In 2022, she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her body of work to date. In 2023, lucy's novel these Days won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Hi, lucy, and welcome to the show. It is fabulous to have you here.
Speaker 2:It's lovely to be here, and especially because I'm here through a friend really, the writer Jan Carson, who is such a fantastic writer, such a good friend, such a staunch supporter of her peers and of other Irish writers. So so I'm grateful to her for making the connection.
Speaker 1:Jan said the same about you and I feel so blessed to have you both in my life now. It's a real treat and I got to say Jan is such a hardworking author.
Speaker 2:She is so dedicated, she works so phenomenally hard and it's wonderful to see the successes that she's having for her work. She's doing something really special, really unique, I think.
Speaker 1:Yes, I completely agree. And when she was here in person in Santa Barbara at the Lunch with an Author Literary Series and then she taught a class in Ojai, california, it was just great and she made sure everybody in that audience knew about contemporary Irish authors. You were mentioned multiple times and, of course, the book that you edited, being Various, which is absolutely superb. Anyway, we'll talk about being Various a little later, but I would love to begin with learning about you and where your love of reading and writing derived.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I am the eldest of three girls born to. My mother is English from a family of Irish Catholic descent, and she was born in Bristol where she met my father. My father's from Northern Ireland. He's Ulster Protestant stock, probably originally from Scotland, and so they have what's termed a mixed marriage in Northern Ireland, which is where you have one parent Protestant, one parent Catholic.
Speaker 2:And they decided, when they fell in love and my mum moved to Northern Ireland in 1975 and they were going to have a family together, they decided they would bring up any children that they had as neither Catholic nor Protestant, which was quite unusual.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's less unusual than you'd think, but at the time it felt we were one of the only families I knew really that didn't go to church, but my sisters and I we were very, very close to each other, very close to my mum, adored my mum, very close to my mum, adored my mum and much of my childhood, the way that I remember it, when I came across the Bronte siblings, I had this rush of recognition, thinking that's what we did.
Speaker 2:We lived in worlds of our own and we would have these rolling sagas, these imaginary worlds we lived in, that would go through any medium we had to hand. We would write our character stories, we would draw them, we would make them out of Lego. When my dad brought home a camcorder, we would film them. It seems that my whole childhood was this rolling fantasy world that we lived in, and I think it was one of the most difficult times of my life. Actually, is I think about when I felt that I had to grow up and leave that world, you know, when I was 11, 12. I still feel that pain and I think it's, you know, one of the saving graces of my life that I found my way back to it, because that's what I do.
Speaker 1:These days, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find this really interesting. I've mentioned this before on the show, but quite a few years ago now I think I was in my early 20s, so that's a long time ago I read an article written by a psychologist and she wrote about the psychological importance of our emotional growth every seven years. So I became fascinated with this concept and many years later I was reminded of this concept after I'd had my two sons, when the eldest turned seven, and then again when the youngest turned seven happened to coincide when a few of our pets started dying and I had to explain to them, you know, what happened to these animals, and it was at that moment that I realized this was the time in their lives that they learned the difference between what was real and what was unreal. You could say what was the fantasy world? So death was a real shock. It was a door opening to this whole other world, and I remember that happening to me too. The article I spoke of earlier mentioned that sometimes this can show itself as night terrors in children.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, it's encoded into so many things, isn't it Like the Jesuits saying give me a child till he's seven and I'll show you the man.
Speaker 2:You know the age at which children are deemed responsible for themselves, their actions. I've definitely been through that death consciousness with my own children, where they suddenly start asking questions about eternity. So as a child, I remember I think I was about eight when I really remember having that sort of consciousness you know the immensity of that consciousness that it's hard to recalibrate. It's hard, after you've had that, to understand that we all live our lives pretending that it's not the case, that we're all going to die because we are. My daughter is seven now, and so I've been through versions of that with both my son, who's now 10, and my daughter, and in the last couple of years I can see it surfacing in interesting ways in the stories that I've been through versions of that with both my son, who's now 10, and my daughter in the last couple of years. I can see it surfacing in interesting ways in the stories that I've been writing the last couple of years.
Speaker 1:Ah, so this explains the character, the young girl in your latest novel, these Days. That's fascinating. I don't want to give too much away, but I can see the connection now that we're speaking about this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember the great writer, derry writer Jennifer Johnson died just last week and I wrote a tribute to her for the Irish Times. And that was because another sort of formative moment for me would have been I was 13, and my English teacher in school we read Jennifer Johnson's book how Many Miles to Babylon with her and she said it's a wonderful homework, which was to write an extra chapter. It could be anywhere in the book that we wanted and I decided to write an extra ending In the book. The main character he is told that he has it's set during the Great War, the First World War, and the main character his best friend, his childhood best friend is sentenced to death by firing squad. And the main character his best friend, his childhood best friend is sentenced to death by firing squad and he has to command the firing squad. Rather than this, he shoots his friend himself. For this he is sentenced to death.
Speaker 2:So the book takes place in the hours the night before his execution and I decided I wanted to stay with him and follow him right up into those final minutes, when the minutes become moments. And I became so absorbed with this and I read Yeats. Jennifer Johnson quotes Yeats in the book and I took Yeats from the school library and read. Yeats fell in love with Yeats and I remember that feeling of it wasn't even so much creating a world, it was tuning into a different world until your world falls away. And I'm taking this character right up until that moment of death and I remember thinking then this is all I want to do, this is what I need to do. So that was another very important moment for me. And how old were you?
Speaker 1:then I would have been 13. Well, that's close to that number seven, that rounding up of 14.
Speaker 2:It is, isn't it yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating. Let's talk about the book being Various, which you wrote the introduction for and you edited. In it you wrote about the spirit of being Irish. Can you expand on this and how climate, migration and refugees are changing the way we think about what makes a person Irish?
Speaker 2:Yes, so the book that I edited, being Various, is the sick, in a series published by Faber, started by the legendary editor David Marcus, and he believed that for a good anthology you would put established, celebrated voices alongside newcomers and that there was something really exciting in that energy. And after he died, the series was continued by Kevin Barry, edited one, joseph O'Connor, edited another, deidre Madden, and I've got a postcard here, mandy, that I can show you. I'll describe it to all of your listeners. This is the famous sepia toned portrait of Ireland's writers and you can see, you can still buy this postcard for sale in Ireland. And we've got James Joyce and Singh and Oscar Wilde and Beckett and, you know, brendan Behan and Shaw and Yates and Bram Stoker, patrick Kavanagh.
Speaker 2:When I signed my first book deal, my sisters found a very studious photograph of me. I have a very blunt fringe and thick tortoiseshell glasses and they tipped out, they stuck me on and tippexed my name in and we all thought this was hilarious, you know, and I was young, I was in university when I signed my first book deal. It was just a big joke, this card, card. But then I would look at it and think, actually, where are the women? You know, where is Mary Lavin? Where is Kate O'Brien? Where's Edna O'Brien? Where is Anne Enright? You know, bringing it forward a generation, where are these stories? And I always thought, if I were to edit an anthology of Irish writing, I would love it to include lots of women, maybe be exclusively women. And also I thought I would love it to include lots of women, maybe be exclusively women. And also I thought I would love to have a really good sense of representation from the North, because as a Northern writer you quite often get disregarded or left off lists of Irish writers.
Speaker 2:And then Sinead Gleeson did a beautiful anthology, seminal anthology, called the Long Gaze Back. That was, 400 years of Irish women writers. I contributed a story to it and at the Northern Irish launch for that there were four of us, the four women, on stage and we were looking at each other, thinking this has never happened in our lives, in our careers. We're never a stage full of women. You know this just hadn't happened. And so we said to Sinead you have to do a sister anthology of writers from the North, and I would have loved to have done it myself, but Sinead was the right person to do it. You know, she didn't know. She was thinking, no, she's not Northern, she's Southern, but she had done such a brilliant job with Long Gaze Back, it had to be hers.
Speaker 2:So after this was done, my editor at Faber said if I were to edit the volume, would I have a vision for it? Because he was thinking, when David Marcus started the series there weren't as many outlets for Irish fiction. Now we have so many. Now it's much more celebrated. Had the anthology series run its course, it took me, I think, just one night to think what would my vision be, and I thought actually my vision would have been a female anthology.
Speaker 2:But now I think this question of what makes a writer Irish it's such a pressing one for a country which, for a good couple of hundred years, irish identity has been predicated on a sense of emigration, you know, and a sense of moving to other places, you know, moving to Canada or moving to the US, or moving to Australia, or moving, you know, emigrating away. But we're reaching a point where Ireland is becoming a place that people are choosing to move to. I think there's a substantial Polish population now in Ireland, there's a substantial Brazilian population and people are coming from all over the world to Ireland in a way that when I was growing up, especially in Northern Ireland, people just didn't. It wasn't somewhere that the people moved to. So I thought this is really interesting and this idea of what is it that does make an Irish story.
Speaker 2:I wanted to break that open a little bit and so in this anthology I commissioned a short story by a Chinese born writer who had met and fallen in love with an Irishman and moved to Dublin, raising an Irish son there. A story by a Nigerian-born writer who came to Ireland as an asylum seeker, Melatu Chikori, and spent years in the horrible direct provision system, which is when you're not allowed to work, when your claim is being processed but you live in these appalling, inhumane, hostile conditions. I have a writer, born in Finland, who chose to come to Ireland in her 20s, married an Irishman, raised children, divorced the Irishman but stayed in Ireland, who cried when I asked her for a story because she said everyone always refers to her as a Finnish writer, not an Irish writer, even though Ireland is a place that she's chosen. Refers to her as a Finnish writer, not an Irish writer, even though Ireland is the place that she's chosen. A writer born Kit Duvall, born in Birmingham to one Irish, one Jamaican parent.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to break it open a little bit and think Ireland is going through such a golden age. The dazzle is so bright. What are the stories we're not hearing? And I think this anthology was published in 2019. And since since then, I think the questions have become even more important about this sense of Ireland. Looking into the future has to have a radically generous way of viewing Irishness, one that is not hierarchical. You know you cannot be considered not Irish, or second citizen, second tier, because you come from the North, for example, or if you're not Catholic, or if you're not. You know, when people think, what does an Irish person look like? You might think that it's one of these. You know bespectacled or bearded white men on the postcard. And that's what I wanted to challenge, because I really do think that the more stories we have and the more ways we have of being and understanding ourselves, the richer we all are, and that's something of what I set to do with that anthology fabulous authors and your wonderful essay at the beginning of the book.
Speaker 1:I think it would be a great book for high schoolers to read in every high school all over the world. The book reinforces that, while we all have differences in the world, we are a diverse cultural mass, if you like. We are all one. We are all human, we all have needs and we need to be heard.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's about where, the places where you see yourselves. You know the stories and I think that I always find it really interesting the way you know, in a family, if someone brings a new partner back, the first thing the family does is start to tell a story. You know, the family tells its own foundational myths, its own stories, and I think that works at the level of a nation or of a country. You know the stories we tell ourselves about how we came to be, why we are the way we are, and writers are, I think, well placed to be closer to the stories, or maybe the stories that aren't serving us. You know the like, the software programs imprinted on our hardware without our consent, and I think of some of the stories.
Speaker 2:One of the stories that I had to and I was glad to dismantle for myself was the idea that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art. Oh my gosh. You know, and I grew up thinking that I couldn't be an artist and a mother. I'd always wanted to be a mother my whole life. I wanted to have children, knew I wanted to have children. I had children, believing that that would be the end of my creative life, and what a joy it was to find that I only started writing the stories that I now know I should be writing once I had children. And I think you can do that on a personal level. You can also do that on a level of national identity, a level of religious identity, and I think it's interesting to think what are these stories that may be explaining something, but also may be trapping?
Speaker 1:us. That has given me a lot to think about and it brings up something that I wanted to ask you about In a Claire Armistead interview. You and Jan Carson were at the JFL International and after listening to Jan read from the raptures, claire asked you about magical realism and you said, quote you can love different types of literature and then you realize you can only write the sort of stories that you can end quote In your latest novel, these Days there are wisps of magical realism with Florence and the Fox, as well as Emma and Sylvia, and I don't want to give too much of this fantastic story away. Emma and Sylvia, and I don't want to give too much of this fantastic story away. But I wondered, were you surprised?
Speaker 2:by this magical essence in the story, and did the characters drive you into this realm? That's such an interesting question. I think a lot of the work that you do as a writer is you have to sharpen your instincts and question your defaults.
Speaker 1:That's interesting and true.
Speaker 2:I think in the context of that conversation, the sort of wildly imaginative stories that Jan writes. You know, someone opens a wardrobe and their dead grandmother is sitting in there reading the Belfast Telegraph. I just know that my brain would not work like that, you know. I just know that a character of mine would never open a wardrobe and see their dead grandmother. It just wouldn't happen.
Speaker 2:But I don't think that we live in logical worlds. I think that there is magic all around us. I think that when we talk about intuition, when we talk about synchronicity, when we talk about visions or symbols that come to us in dreams, all of that, to me that's a sort of I suppose that's a sort of magical realism. But if you're right, in in the book, the section that you're describing on florence, who's the mother, who's perhaps my favorite character in the book a bit of her has been frozen in time because she lost when she was was very young. She lost her lover in the Battle of the Somme. He, like so many from Ulster, died there, didn't come back and although on one level she's gone on, she's married a doctor. She was lucky to marry, she thinks, so many women, so many men were lost, so many women didn't have the option to marry. She's had three children, they're prosperous, and yet some part of her soul is trapped in the past and she realizes that to move on she's going to have to let her lover go, and she has lived as if he might come back any day. And so she decides she has to let him go. And then she, she has a moment where she's in her garden and she sees this, this fox, and his name is renard, which means fox, and she knows that it's him and in the scene.
Speaker 2:The way that I write it, the way that I write a lot of my things, is it has to be real and not real on the same level at the same time. And so for Florence, on the one hand, the logical explanation is there's a fox in her garden and she's attributing some kind of mystical encounter to it. On the other hand, of course it's real. Renard's soul has come back in the way that it can, in a way that he knows that she'll understand to say goodbye. And so I think, when I would say I'm not a magic realist writer, I'm not in a sort of specific way, in the way that you know, there aren't any flying carpets, there aren't any, you know, flaming pillars. There aren't dead grandmothers In closets, in closets. But at the same time, I like to allow there to be magic in the work, as I think there is in our everyday lives if we just tune into it and are open to it and let ourselves see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you and I were speaking earlier about dreams and specifically Jung, because we're both interested in his work, and the fact that you have a kitten in the story struck me as pertinent because cats are considered to be extremely psychic and if you own a cat, or if you have a cat and let's be honest here, because nobody really owns a cat, they choose and own us then I think you would have to agree with that idea.
Speaker 2:You know, mandy, the hilarious thing is I have never had a cat, I didn't grow up with pets, I hadn't had a cat and I wrote a cat into these days and it was one of the things I was trying to show that not just the human devastation but the animal devastation, the bombing, the blitz was such that there were packs of stray dogs, there were cats without homes, there were animals in the zoo that needs to be, you know, killed, put down, and so I had this bag of kittens that had been abandoned and my intention was this character tries to rescue a kitten, but doesn't. The kitten dies. But I just couldn't bring myself to kill this kitten and I kept on thinking come on, it's too sentimental to let the kitten live. You have to kill this kitten, kitten. And on the morning that I was kind of stealing myself to write this scene that I just couldn't write, I happened to speak to another northern Irish friend, the writer Glenn Patterson. I was checking some facts about Belfast and he's a great historian of the city and I said to him oh, I'm dreading ending this phone call because I have to go and kill a kitten. And he said oh, no, no, no, can the kitten not live and he had cats himself and I thought OK, and so then I decided I would let this kitten live. And then it's almost as if this kitten came into my fiction.
Speaker 2:And then we moved flat and the neighbors had a cat and the cat said that a real cat started walking along the fence, would jump through my study window and come into my desk and this cat got pregnant and we would stroke it and we could feel the kittens and and I thought this is so funny I started off with the cat has come to me in my imagination through the pages of my book. Now it's materialized. We have to have this kitten and we were living in a rental house. We weren't allowed pets and I thought we just have to have this kitten. So the litter was born. There were only three of them. One was a very pretty Siamese looking kitten that someone claimed, and there were two splotchy black and white kittens. One of them was a very pretty little girl. So my children chose the girl kitten and we said we'd collect it when it was old enough.
Speaker 2:That night I had a dream in which the boy kitten came to me and said I want to be your kitten, I love it. In the morning the children came piling into the bedroom and I always I ask my children every morning you know, what did you dream? I think dreams are so important. And I said to them, what did you dream? And my son said mummy, mummy, the boy kitten came to me in a dream and said that he wants to be our kitten. And then, you know, mandy, you could say that we're, we're connected and we're dreaming each other's dream. Or maybe the kitten visited us in a dream.
Speaker 2:So I rang the neighbours and I said you know, can we just come back and see these kittens again? Girl kitten hid behind the sofa and hissed at us. Boy kitten came padding over and climbed onto my son's lap. And I said to the neighbours, obviously I didn't say to them I had a dream and I just said look, if we're going to take a kitten, it has to be okay with the children, so we'll take the boy kitten. And in fact, about a month ago I was having this awful nightmare and into the dream came the cat, came my cat, and chased away, scared away, this thing that was trying to attack me in the dream. So I'm very much, yeah, we're on the same wavelength there.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love this whole connection. It's strange because when I was reading the story and the cat came into the world, I thought to myself I wonder if Lucy knows how deep she just stepped into this realm. And then, when the fox appeared, I thought to myself yes, she does. And now you've shared this story about your real cat. I know there was something else at work here. Let's talk about your writing, because you write in different formats plays, radio dramas, novels and short stories. How far do you get into the idea of a story before you decide which form it will take, or are you commissioned to write a specific format?
Speaker 2:If I am hired or commissioned to do something again, it's interesting what we're talking about I never make a decision on a logical basis. You know, I I go with what my gut says, I go with what my instinct says. So if I'm asked to do something, and I think I will be able to do it, only once have I taken a commission. When I was quite young I took a theatre commission for the money. I needed the money and I knew it was wrong at the time. But I overrode my instinct because I needed the money and it was a. It didn't work, it was a disaster sort of psychically and as a piece of art and and I just thought never again. So I work quite intuitively like that but funnily enough, I never start writing something in one form and then decided something else.
Speaker 2:For me the form and content have to serve each other. You know, it's not as if you can take an idea and I've I've trans. You know I've I've adapted my own work. I've adapted stage plays to radio. I've adapted a short story for a radio. You know, I've I've adapted things that already exist between forms occasionally, but for the most part I think the key is being in control of the possibilities and limitations of each form, knowing the things that you can do, and for me there's no difference between the idea and its execution. You know, for me the piece of art is the process, not the product. If that makes sense, yes, absolutely, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:Lucy, you've spoken about the variousness of the Irish story, but how do you see the variousness of Irish history playing out in the arts?
Speaker 2:I think we're at a really interesting moment. If you look at the, even just to stay within the sphere of, you know my own art, which is literature, there are just so, so many writers coming through, and you know a couple of books that I've read recently. I've just read a collection of short stories by a writer from the north of Ireland called Leda McQuinn and it's called Everyone Still here. It's published by the mighty Stinging Fly Press, I think this month, and the stories are phenomenal. I think the opening story is a masterpiece. It's called we All Go. It's just incredible.
Speaker 2:There's a novel being published later on this year by Wendy Erskine called the Benefactors, who's a very fine short story writer, who happens to be my secondary school English teacher and we stayed friends after I left and I was actually one of her first editors. I published a story by her in being Various, which I'm very proud that we have that very special relationship. Her novel is phenomenal. It makes 90% of the prose you read feel flat and lifeless. It's it's brimming with humanity, it's full of voice, it's just brilliant. There's um uh, michael mcgee his his debut close to home, which is about young men and young men who've been maybe let down by the good friday agreement and who are struggling, and it's about male violence and it's about generational trauma and violence set in, um know, republican communities in West Belfast. That was that has done very, very well, deservedly so. Another debut by Amy Walsh, a writer that I mentored, louise Kennedy. There are short stories by Bernie McGill, which are beautiful, so sensitive. Rosemary Jenkinson, which are really scabrous. We've got all of these writers working at the same time as writers like David Park, who's very underrated, and Glenn Patterson, anna Burns, whose Milkman is a masterpiece. Louise Kennedy, trespasses likewise.
Speaker 2:There's this sense of all of this writing is coming. There's this sense of all of this writing is coming and it's interesting because we are 25 years post the Good Friday Agreement, the ceasefire, the broad peace to the island and I think a lot of the stories a story like Milkman, a story like Trespasses could not be written in the direct aftermath of that lived experience. You know, it takes time to understand something and have enough distance from something to start understanding it and writing it and to know how to deal with some of that psychic pain. But also, I think there's a moment where we started off this, this conversation, by talking how supportive writers are of each other and I think there really is a feeling among writers in Northern Ireland of being in it together and of realising that everyone's gain, everyone's achievement, lifts you all and makes it more possible for all of us.
Speaker 2:There's always been a very strong crime. I mean we haven't even touched on crime writing, you know, for a long time, in the absence of any Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was the crime writers and the writers writing border stories that were doing a lot of that, you know, interrogation and difficult stories and turning over difficult things, doing a lot of that interrogation and difficult stories and turning over difficult things. So I think art and literature in Northern Ireland has served, it's had a really interesting moment, despite the fact that it is so chronically underfunded compared to the rest of the UK and compared to Ireland.
Speaker 1:Is it mostly in the North where the arts are underfunded?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I looked at the figures actually because I didn't want to misquote them, and the per capita arts spending in the Republic of Ireland is the equivalent in sterling of £25.90. This is last year's figures. In Northern Ireland it's £5.00, £7.00. That's the disparity. It's five pounds, seven pounds. That's the disparity. To give a bit of context, in Wales it's £10.51 per capita. So it's still substantially less. And then what you get in Northern Ireland is so many people living below the poverty line, children, especially people who are maybe third generation, unemployment, chronic underfunding of cities like Derry, no university, no funding for the university there, no funding for the arts, things like mobile libraries being taken away. The writer Kerry New Doherty in her Debbie Finn Places writes so beautifully and so excoriatingly about what it means to grow up in poverty and see one lifeline to the arts after another just taken away, and so I think there are a lot of. This is happening despite the lack of funding and not because of it.
Speaker 1:I feel some of the most profound art appears in the toughest of times, and while this isn't always the case, it seems to be the time when the arts can change the world. I recently interviewed Vinny from Charlie Burns Bookshop and I asked him what keeps him in Galway and he answered it's the arts. We have such a strong theatre community here, and as I started researching you, I learned that Galway was where your first play was performed.
Speaker 2:My debut play was done by the legendary Gary Hines and Drew at Theatre. That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yes, Vinnie proudly spoke about this too. How about you give our listeners a synopsis of these Days?
Speaker 2:Yes, of course. So these Days is a novel set during the Belfast Blitz, and the Belfast Blitz was the series of aerial raids by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. So it was during, very specifically, april to May 1941. And not many people know about it, but the city was devastated to the extent that we have Luftwaffe pilots on record flying over the burning city saying, my God, what have we done? We have people saying Belfast is never going to come back from this. Belfast at the time was where a lot of the industry was located. You know the rope works and the shipbuilding and the aircraft. So in terms of the UK war effort effort, it was very important. But people thought that the neutrality of Ireland Ireland at the time very, very young nation was neutral during the second world war and people thought that the neutrality of the Ireland as a whole might protect Northern Ireland. This was a kind of wishful thinking really, because because of course all the industry was there, belfast was, was such a target, but they thought it wouldn't happen and for a long time it didn't happen and then, when it finally did happen, the city was was devastated, some of the worst um aerial raids outside of London, you know, when you think of the Blitz you might think of um, you know Coventry or Bristol or Liverpool or you know, but you wouldn't necessarily think of Belfast, and I hadn't really.
Speaker 2:When my son was very young, one of his favourite books was a children's book called Pipo, and it's a board book. I don't know if your listeners will be familiar with it, but if it made it over to the States. But it's the life of a baby against the backdrop of the Second World War and it's very easy. Here's a little baby one, two, three stands in his cot. What does he see? And it's one of those books that's very satisfying to read as an adult because you can see. For the child they're just looking at the baby and his sisters going fishing with jam jars, but as an adult, you see in the background the zeppelins and the bombed out buildings and the father at the end is dressed in uniform. He's going away. Maybe the baby will never see the father again. So as an adult, there's this story going on in the background. That makes it very satisfying and I started to think so.
Speaker 2:Many of my favorite writers are, you know, those great stylists like Virginia Woolf and Rosamund Lehmann and Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Graham Greene and Henry Greene and Louis McNeice they're all writers of the London Blitz and I started to think there's a. There was a Belfast Blitz that that you know, I knew had happened. I didn't know very much about it and when I started researching it I was completely shocked myself to discover the extent of it and it doesn't really exist in much fiction. There's one novel by Rianne Moore called the Emperor of Ice Cream, reissued recently by a brilliant small press. That's it really, and I started thinking there are all these stories. I started researching the stories because the Belfast Blitz, um, people who were children during it were in. This was the winter of 2019, they were then in their 80s, um, and so as 2019 tipped into 2020, I'm sure we can all see where this is going.
Speaker 2:The book started gaining momentum. But also suddenly, once COVID set in and our lockdown in the UK overlapped almost entirely onto the Blitz, you know, end of March, april to May, and I was speaking to these people with such an urgency I spoke to one woman who was 103 about her experiences of living through the Belfast Blitz and it felt so precious to take these stories and to preserve them and save them and make something of them and occasionally I would set up a conversation and by the time the day came, that person would have died. Because we were losing our elderly first of all, and I was asking them their childhood memories. And there was something else that was going on at the same time, which was my children at the time were two and five and I was thinking what are they going to remember of this? And I was trying to keep things normal for them. You know, my son turned six and so he got his first bike and we taught him how to ride his bike on the hour.
Speaker 2:A day we were allowed to go outside and I was thinking about what it means to grow up in the Troubles in Belfast, what it means to live through COVID and the ways in which you don't get to put your normal life on hold. You know you don't get to pause your pregnancy, you don't get to. You know you don't get. You still turn six, you still have your baby, you still like. Life goes on in ways that are both terrible and our salvation terrible and our salvation.
Speaker 2:And so I was writing every day, I would go to my desk and I would be immersed in 1941 to the extent that it did feel more real to me at times than the London that I was, that I was then living through, and it felt at times like I had opened this portal between worlds. And I understood it in a way that there was a lot of idle talk of blitz spirit, which in the UK media was, you know, stiff upper lip and you know, keep calm and carry on and we're good in a crisis. But I understood it in a fundamentally different way. That was the radical provisionality. You know, we had no idea if life would ever return to normal, what that normal might look like. We had no idea how deadly this virus was going to be. We had no idea if our days were limited, you know, we had no idea, in the same way, that the people in the Blitz just had to carry on with life, because what else can you do?
Speaker 1:So I had this profound new understanding of it, I think Everything you have just explained comes through in the book and I love what you said about life goes on. You're still pregnant, you still have a birthday. In the written synopsis of the novel these days is the line quote after all, emma thinks, if one is to survive, one must survive for something. End quote. I didn't read the synopsis until after I'd read the novel and when I read that sentence it confirmed for me that the truth of these days lies in the courage of your female characters and their relationship with war. War is the antagonist in this story. What are your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think that in times of extremity, maybe that we understand something of ourselves. That might be courage, that might not be. I think it's at those times, those times of extremity, you make decisions, you understand things about the life that you're living and the life that you should be living. You know, I found it so striking during COVID how many people would split up from a long-term partner or find a new partner or decide they were giving up their job or they were moving to the country.
Speaker 2:People made radical decisions quite fast and I think it's that sort of clarity that when someone is dying, you know if you're at the bedside of someone who's dying. It's so clear that we just need to love each other and we just need to forgive. And there are certain moments, I think, certain moments when we're in extremis, that it becomes clear how we should be living and the ways we try to. We don't live our lives because we're scared scared of what others might think of us or scared ourselves and all of the women in my book, the war it knocks them out of their groove, in good ways or bad ways. They suddenly question, or have the chance to question, the route their life might otherwise have taken, and then that is when they come face. You know, have to confront these questions of what is this life that I'm living, Is it worth?
Speaker 1:it and I might add, what do I need to do with my life to make me feel fulfilled?
Speaker 1:I won't go into it too much here, but a few years ago I had an episode with my heart and I went in for a procedure and which was going to be just, you know, 90 minute surgery, but I ended up bleeding and it went to about.
Speaker 1:I think it was like nine and a half hours later I woke up with a tube down my throat and I was in ICU for six days. It wasn't until I got home I began to think about the process of healing, the long process of healing emotionally and physically, and I started to think about what I was doing, how the most important thing to me was to give back to the arts and how it would feel if I didn't do this, and there was just an empty void in my life when I thought about that. So that is why I do what I do. I do the podcast to support independent bookshop owners and booksellers and authors, and I do in-person events with authors and people in the community, because I understand that in a single moment it's all gone, and that's what I try to explain to people now, as you were explaining about the story of the women in your book. This is it. This is all we have this moment and, as you said earlier, everything is about love.
Speaker 2:Yes, you have to keep that in, mandy and thank you for sharing that. And I wonder, did you feel anything symbolic in that? It was your heart bursting open, the way that you talk about it, about wanting to be of service and community, and your hands, as you were talking, there was something expanding from your chest centre. Did you feel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did, you know, when I was in the ICU ward, it was it's crazy in there and I had tubes coming out of me everywhere and they couldn't figure out what was actually happening with my heart after a while. So they ended up having to put this. It's called a butterfly something. It's a tube that goes through your neck and into your heart and it's amazing, you can see. I mean, they get all of this information that is needed, and so they kind of explained to me what was going to happen.
Speaker 1:And there were quite a few people in the room, you know, and, because it's a research hospital, the young guy who did this procedure on me I think it was his first time and I just remembered wondering how does he feel, because this was serious stuff and I just quietly spoke to him and I said you know I have perfect faith in you and your work. I know you can do this, in you and your work. I know you can do this. And afterwards he said to me that was the last thing he expected me to say, and so, yeah, I guess I did think about it and I realized that patience and love it truly is what it's about, what life is about I just envisioned love all around this doctor.
Speaker 2:Beautiful and what a gift. And it's one of those moments where you think, you know, and they happen so often, if you think what if the whole of my life, all the circumstances, the choices, the decisions have been so intricately carefully orchestrated to put me in the place to deliver the message to someone else that they need to hear? And I love you know there's such a tension between in a novel, of course you're in control of everything and you don't give a character, you know, a burst heart unless you're in control of the symbolism or the wisdom of the novel is in control of that. But I think it's so interesting to think of the ways that we can live our life, as if every single interaction is a chance, is orchestrated, is a chance for us to do or be something, a chance for us to be better. You know I love the. I was in India recently.
Speaker 1:I saw your photos on Instagram. It looked absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was incredible. And I went to a Ramakrishna temple with a Hindu friend of mine who's a devotee of Ramakrishna, and we went to do Saraswati Puja. You know, saraswati, the goddess of the upper chakra, the goddess of the third eye, the goddess of poetry of the upper chakra is a goddess of the third eye, the goddess of poetry, and my friend was launching a book and so we went to, you know, pay our homage, and Ramakrishna, one of the Swami Vivekananda, who talks about this world. He describes it as this world is a gymnasium. We're here to get stronger at loving and we have all of these tests and all of these experiences that are solely so that we can get better at loving. And I think that sometimes, you know, I'm going through kind of a humdrum day and you think, how can every interaction I have be symbolic or be meaningful? As if this were a novel, as if this were, you know, a beautiful algebraic equation, you know that comes out perfectly in the end.
Speaker 1:What you said about the gymnasium of love oh my goodness, that's so beautiful, lucy. Before we go, I would love to hear about the masterclass that you teach through Faber Academy. I would love to hear about the masterclass that you teach through Faber Academy. Is that available in person and online?
Speaker 2:I just kept it online. It used to be in person and I was always quite resistant to teaching online because I think there's something very special about being in person, but then again, one of the you know the curse that turned out to be a blessing is in COVID. It went online as it had to and I started getting people from all over the world, which was just incredible. Currently, I have someone who sets an alarm for 3.45 in Sydney and does my course between 4 and 6.30am and I have people who've done it from India, from the States, from Dubai, from all over Europe, from Russia, and just the different, the fresh perspectives that people bring. Because my masterclass I love it. It's a cornerstone of my own writing practice, my masterclass on the short story.
Speaker 2:But I see it as it's not me telling people what to do. I can only write the stories that I can write, and if anyone else tried to write my sort of stories, it wouldn't work. But there are stories that every single person, and only that person, can write, and so what we do is we read stories and we discuss how they work and we discuss techniques, and what I want to do is for every single person to get writing the stories that they, and only they, can. There's a lovely I love the Sufi image of creation as this big vibrational, almost like a harp, you know, and every single person has to vibrate their own particular note and if you're trying to vibrate your neighbours or if you're not in tune with yourself, the whole of Cosmos is out of sync and I love that and I always think I want every person to be vibrating their own particular stories, and so I always think I'm not so much teaching as we're exploring together.
Speaker 1:And that's why you're such a great teacher. Now is this course selective.
Speaker 2:No, it's not selective, so it's first come, first serve. You do have to be on the waiting list to get a chance at getting a place, but all that entails is sending an email and asking to be informed when the next booking opens up Now these Days is published in the USA by SJP, which is an imprint of Zando, and SJP is Sarah Jessica Parker's publishing company.
Speaker 1:I am so excited about Zando because I interviewed Gillian Flynn last year in person and she also has an imprint through Zando. So how did you end up getting published by Sarah Jessica Parker through Zando in the US?
Speaker 2:Well, it's just about to come out, the book with Zando and with Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint, sjp Lit. She is doing a really brilliant thing where she is highlighting the importance of there being various stories for women, you know, and and telling multiple stories, um, by and about and for a woman. And so this, this book, fit in with with her, her ethos, and it was an editor at Zando, an editor, very interesting editor, called Cailin, who has an Irish connection herself. Her father, um, is originally from Mississippi.
Speaker 2:Um, african-american, went to Derry in Ireland, fell in love with an Irish girl and married her, and then Cailin and her sibling were, I think, born in London and then raised in New York. And so she's got a very interesting connection to her own sense of Irishness and again to the sense of everything we were talking about, about expanding the possibilities of what it means to be Irish or to be of Irishness, and again to this sense of everything we were talking about about expanding the possibilities of what it means to be Irish or to be of Irish heritage. And so she just felt she was. I was very grateful that she had read and liked the novel, because I felt this is the right home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, they're a wonderful press and I love what Zando is doing, and they are lucky to have you. Well, you're at the end of your day, I'm at the beginning of mine, so I guess, even though we could talk all day, I'd better let you go.
Speaker 2:This is my teaching evening, in fact, so I will be teaching from about seven, so I feel very invigorated by our conversation. Mandy, it's been such a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Likewise. It's been great chatting with you too. You take care. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. You've been listening to my conversation with author Lucy Caldwell about her new book these Days. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, Adrienne Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Perala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye.