Molly Forsythe speaks to the award-winning writer about his critically acclaimed short-story, Young Skins.
For Colin Barrett, 2014 has been a year marked by a series of “wonderfully bewildering, gratuitous, and nice” events. His debut collection of short stories, Young Skins, has racked up an impressive number of awards including the Guardian First Book Award, the Rooney Prize, as well as the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Opening with the line, “My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk,” Young Skins offers a vivid exploration of life in the fictional western town of Glanbeigh. Drawing from his own experiences, the Mayo-born writer aims to tap into “that marginalisation, that sense of frustration, entrapment and the confinement that you can find in small towns; but importantly also to show that these are places where very peculiar and interesting things can happen.”
Throughout the collection, Barrett expertly captures both sides of small-town life with writing that is both humorous and absolutely heart-breaking, something that keeps in harmony with his goal for any collection: “I hope they’re funny and I hope they do something interesting with language.”
Focusing on a motley set of characters, including nightclub bouncers, pool sharks and small-time gangsters, the prevailing mood of Young Skins is one of alienation. Yet the author manages to maintain a careful balance between sadness and humour; his colourful evocation of the local idiom injects a welcome streak of black humour into the otherwise bleak landscape of Glanbeigh.
“Barrett expertly captures both sides of small-town life with writing that is both humorous and absolutely heart-breaking.”
As darkly funny as it is violent and perverse, Barrett’s depiction of rural Ireland is as wild as the American West. He clarifies this with a wry smile: “I suppose a small town is a good setting for these things because the society is a bit more diffused or scattered. The police have less of a presence. There are a lot of empty streets and by-roads so if people are eccentric or malevolent they can find a nice shed somewhere and be left alone to go about their… activities.”
His current success was preceded by many years of hard graft refining his style. “You could euphemistically call it ‘apprentice work’,” he comments, “but really it was just sh… bad stuff; but that’s vital and necessary.” A self-confessed lexophile, Barrett says he always wanted to write and that his obsession with narrative and language began in childhood.
He initially tried his hand at poetry; enticed by the form’s potential to achieve “something different with language… It wasn’t just language as a utility to tell a story. Poetry is concerned with language in and of itself.” His current style, a result of years of hard work and experimentation, is an elegant mixture of prose and poetic technique.
He adds that reading the work of established authors can often provide an essential guide to budding authors. For him, now more established in his career, reading offers a helpful means of “finding out if you have anything to say, of understanding your own experiences and learning how to order them into something you can use.”
He cites the Southern Gothic as a particularly influential tranche of literature for him, reserving particular admiration for Flannery O’Connor, adding that he relishes the “marriage between humour and violent, bleak occurrences.”
However, it is the Limerick-born Kevin Barry (a writer whose work is frequently compared to Barrett’s) that has had the most significant impact on him. Barrett explains that Barry’s 2007 collection There Are Little Kingdoms was a revelation: “Even though the stories are often very surreal, it was nonetheless an Ireland I recognised and wanted to write about.
“When I was younger, I didn’t have the intelligence or insight to realise that small-town life could be an intrinsically very interesting topic if done well. It took examples like Kevin Barry or Flannery O’Connor to realise that you could find everything about the human condition, or whatever else it is that you’re into, in a small town. You can find it anywhere really; you just need to be bright enough to see it.”
He warns young writers against rushing the writing process: “Go as slow as you need with it. When you write something, make sure to leave some time after and revisit it later, so that when you go back you can improve it.” One of the major advantages of being unpublished, moreover, is “the total freedom to experiment. You try and fail and you try again. You can try out different genres, different styles, voices and sensibilities.”
So what can fans of Young Skins expect in the future? Barrett states that he is making tentative steps towards a new work – a novel this time. Although it won’t “move too far away from the rural, small-town world” of Young Skins, he is anticipating the challenge of a new form that “requires you do different things with language, narrative and structure and scope.”