A Welsh writer living in Ireland, Thomas Morris is the author of a debut story collection, “We Don’t Know What We’re Doing” and a new collection of stories, “Open Up,” which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He’s a former editor of The Stinging Fly literary journal, and here he takes the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book of stories, “Open Up” (a collection that Sally Rooney called “brilliant,” which must also be nice).
I find it really hard to give an elevator pitch for my work! I’m immensely proud of “Open Up,” and a part of me always resists summarizing what the stories are about, or to talk about their “themes” or to try and sell them in any way. With short stories especially, I think the work lives or dies according to the readers’ experience of being inside the stories – both during and afterwards.
There are five stories in “Open Up,” and there’s a real drop of my blood in each one. I write as a way to uncover and process feelings and emotions, and then the drafting process is often a means of me going deeper and eventually finding an aesthetic vessel that can best contain it all. The stories in “Open Up” took six years to write, during which time I felt very strange to myself, very stuck. I was depressed and didn’t understand how to be a person anymore; or rather, I didn’t know how to be the person I’d always been up until then. It was only through seriously reengaging with reading that I slowly became aware of the existence of what people might call “an inner life”; and my writing became a way for me to follow and map the streets and canals and tunnels of my emotional histories.
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The strangeness of these working-out years is perhaps reflected in the forms and content of these stories: “Aberkariad” is a novella concerning a family of seahorses; “Passenger” is a maze-like story about a couple on their first holiday together; “Birthday Teeth” is about a young man who identifies as a vampire and is saving up to get his teeth sharpened into fangs. The stories in this book still surprise me.
Q. One of the stories in the collection, “Wales,” features a father and son attending a soccer (sorry, football) match, and touches on a lot of things: the magical thinking of fans, the humanity of one’s parents, among them. Would you mind talking a little about that story?
For years, I had tried to write a story about an estranged father and son going on an outing, but I could never quite it make it work. Then one day a radio producer emailed, asking if I’d like to write and record a story for BBC Radio 4: a 14-minute slot, on the theme of “Spring.” Those two constraints were crucial in pushing me to find a clearer scenario, and later in the drafting, to properly uncover the roots that were pushing through. Gareth, the young boy, hasn’t seen his father in three months, and he and his mother are experiencing severe financial precarity. He’s dealing with a lot, and he’s investing and projecting – as many of us do – a lot of hope into and onto the outcome of one football match. I think of “Open Up” as a suite of stories, and this opening story, “Wales” as the prelude, lightly introducing themes and strains that you’ll hear later in the book, in darker, more complicated ways.
You can read “Wales” on the LitHub website and listen to the author reading it on BBC Radio 4 ( www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016gsh).
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
I’ve bought and gifted countless copies of “Talking to Women” by Nell Dunn. It’s a candid set of conversations between the author and her friends, recorded and written down in 1964. The interviews are so frank, so open, and I’ve found that sharing the book with friends makes for very good conversations.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m really enjoying “Poor Artists” by Gabrielle De La Puente amd Zarina Muhammad and I’ve having a very good time with Henry James’s short stories. I’m a former editor at The Stinging Fly, and I mentor emerging writers on a freelance basis, so I’m always reading as-yet-unpublished work. I love it, and I find the conversations with the writers hugely stimulating and energizing: it’s forever expanding and reframing what I think is possible in fiction, and perhaps in life, too.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
I just go on instinct, very little thought. This year I’ve been especially drawn to novellas. A few recent favorites include “Valentino” by Natalia Ginzburg and “Whereabouts” by Jhumpa Lahiri; I’ve been invigorated by the emotional precision in both these books.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
“Avocado Baby” by John Burningham, in which a baby eats avocados and gets so strong he’s able to pick up furniture. I think the book speaks to that particular kind of wish fulfilment so present in young children: the desire to have a magic power that can transform your environment. It’s a feeling that seems to persist, for some people, into adulthood. I think characters in “Open Up” perhaps share that same wish.
Q. Is there a book you’re nervous to read?
My next one.
Q. Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?
I would love to encounter more story collections set in one place. Some of my foundational reading experiences were exactly this: “Dubliners” by James Joyce; Dylan Thomas’s “A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Dog”; Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street.”
Q. Which books are you planning to read next?
“Fun and Games” by John Patrick McHugh
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” I read it the September after I finished school. I was 18 and looking for a full-time job, so that I could save and move to Dublin for university the following year. The summer was over, and a lot of my friends had already left for university, and I was facing into a year with no idea what I would do. I remember walking back from a job interview I knew had gone badly, and sitting on a bench under a tree in a park, and reading the opening pages in that lovely September light. The book framed life in such a beautiful, meaningful way that I was overcome with a flowing sense of peace. For weeks after, I felt very calm, even as my mother kept saying, “But you still need to get a job!”
Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?
In Dublin, I love Books Upstairs, which is a family-run, independent bookstore. I love Marrowbone Books, which is a beautiful, quiet, shop dedicated to second-hand books. And then there’s Hodges Figgis, which has been going for over 250 years: it’s so well-stocked and I’m forever finding new authors I’ve never heard of.
In Wales, I love Troutmark Books in Cardiff. It’s a second-hand bookshop in an arcade, and it’s full of titles I’ve been meaning to read for years. It’s also very close to a shop dedicated to Welsh cakes (google this!), so every now and then I’ll be browsing through the back catalogue of some nicely obscure 19th-century German writer, when a warm waft of baked goods will come floating in. It’s a dream.
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
Hi there, what’s it like being you?
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