Tell me about your new story collection, I Hear You
The collection is stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4. There are three stand-alone stories and a 10-part story sequence, The Circus.
How did the fact they were originally written for radio influence their style?
The stories have to be 2,000 words to fit into the Radio 4 time slot. It takes some time to recalibrate your story writing to that length, to be compact but still have depth and a satisfying journey for the listener.
The linked story sequence, The Circus, is set around Cliftonville Circus in Belfast. What was your thinking?
I was asked to do it by BBC producer Michael Shannon, who’d commissioned two of the other stories in the collection, Cuckoo and Daddy Christmas. It’s a slot that only comes up every once in a while. The only authors from Northern Ireland I’d known who’d written for it were Jan Carson and David Park, and both of their series had ended up being published – so big boots to fill and expectations of quality were high. The idea came from the title and one line I’d written in a notebook. I thought it would make a great TV series about people who lived around Cliftonville Circus, near where I was brought up and live now. Each road goes to a different religion and a different class, different culture, different nationality.
Was it your ambition to provide a corrective to the troubled image of north Belfast?
I was interested in the intersection of communities and in illustrating the realities of the past and present running alongside each other. Belfast has moved on but the living histories and traditions are alive, touchable if you chose to reach there. It’s an interesting time in this part of the city, where gentrification is introducing itself with a mixture of receptions.
Daddy Christmas was a big hit in our Christmas magazine. Tell us about it.
Ah, that’s great to hear. I have such a soft spot for that story. I love Christmas, so when I was asked to submit ideas I was beside myself. I was that kid who sat down with the TV Times and Radio Times and circled the shows I wanted to listen to and watch over Christmas, so to think I could be part of that huge tradition was beyond my career expectations. The story had to go through many hoops in BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio 4 across the water, right to the big “them up top” to get the green light and I understood why.
[ Daddy Christmas: a short story by Paul McVeighOpens in new window ]
Your writing has shown an ongoing commitment to working-class and queer representation. Was this a deliberate part of the mix?
They are communities I am part of and I would have to make a conscious effort to avoid them in my writing. Although I do believe that a writer has a duty to speak for those who don’t have a voice, and if that is their own communities then that duty deepens, I also believe that stories can have their own voice and tale to tell unrelated to your usual concerns – take Cuckoo in the collection, for example, about a man’s experience with traumatic surgery.
Your roots are in comedy. How important is humour in your writing?
It’s not in everything I write but it’s in most. Even in my most emotional stories, like Tickles in the collection, about a man visiting his mother who has dementia, there are my wisecracks and one-liners. I think it’s a Belfast thing. I think it’s a working-class thing. I think it’s a gay thing. In fact, I think it would be hard to find a group of people humour isn’t a thing for. It’s a human thing. I think there’s this pressure that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer you have to write in a serious tone – that if you are funny, that’s a lesser talent, in literary terms. In my novel The Good Son, when I first wrote it, it was very depressing. I made a decision to rewrite it and put the joy and fun into it.
Tell us more about that novel, your debut
I wanted to write a story that I hadn’t read. When I was growing up, I wondered why weren’t there people like me in books – working-class kids on the cusp of their sexuality. I wanted to talk about the brutality of life for children growing up in the Troubles and counterbalance that with the abundance of love and joy that children have.
Has moving home from England affected your writing?
Yes, I think being in Belfast instead of London had a huge impact. There are more people in London than on the island of Ireland. One of things that hit me was not being able to leave the past behind. I was with someone in London for 10 years, and after we broke up I never bumped into them again, even though we were both gay and technically went to the same bars and clubs. In Belfast, you go on a bad date and after that you bump into them every time you go out. Belfast makes you live with the past in so many ways – maybe that’s why we find it so hard to let go.
Which projects are you working on?
I’m working on my next collection. I’m also writing a book in my head but I’m afraid of putting it on to paper.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Keep your overheads low. I didn’t quite understand it when I first heard it, then it made me laugh hard and now its truth depresses me.
I Hear You is published by Salt
