Interviewing Sam Thompson

Helloooo!

I recently reviewed the excellent short story collection Whirlwind Romance by Sam Thompson an often unsettling set of tales that may be glimpses of the supernatural or just character’s minds playing tricks on them. I was lucky to have the chance to ask Sam some questions about the creation of this book and the stories within it.

How would you tempt someone to read Whirlwind Romance?

I'd say that Whirlwind Romance is a book of short stories that exist in the space between the waking world and dreamland -- where most of us spend most of our time. It's a book you can read in the way you'd explore a shadowy old town. There's no one path you have to follow, and you can visit many different kinds of house: some small and creepy, some large and rambling, some experimental and odd. But all the houses are at least a little bit haunted.  

A lot of your stories hover between a logical and an unnatural explanation of what happened, and we never get the final answer. Do you enjoy creating the ambiguity?

Yes, very much. Several of the stories in the book work with a Turn of the Screw-style ambiguity, where a character experiences something strange but we can't be sure if it's objectively real or a delusional perception. I just find this sort of puzzle endlessly interesting, because in daily life we're required to police that boundary ruthlessly if we want to be seen as sane members of a sane world, but inside we're crossing it all the time. Several more stories are about those moments when our coherent, logical account of what we're doing in our lives stops making sense and starts to feel unnatural and false.

I often feel I want to leave a story balanced on that pinpoint of ambiguity - that's often what makes a story feel true. Not getting the final answer is important because it's a way of making a story bigger on the inside, opening a limitless space inside a tight boundary, where the reader may get lost...

Which comes first for you: the character or the situation the story happens in?

It varies, and one of the joys of making a collection like Whirlwind Romance is that it lets you bring together stories that have grown from very different seeds and find out what they have to say to one another. This book contains stories that have begun with a character ('Eurydice Box'), a situation ('The Monstrosity in Love'), a structural idea ('Whirlwind Romance'), a tone of voice ('We Have Been To A Marvellous Party') -- and others that began with the desire to conjure up a certain genre atmosphere ('One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen'), or to invent a fictional author ('The Heights of Sleep') or an imaginary video game ('Pilgrim: Hinterlands'). Some of the stories are after-echoes of novels I've written in the past ('The Walker', Listen') and some are life-forms that emerged from the wreckage of novels that never quite got written ('The Red Song', 'Seafront Gothic'). And some, the later ones, are stories that grew up in the gaps between the earlier stories when I laid them side by side.

Which story was the hardest to write?

As far as I can remember it was the title story - even though, as it's turned out, I think it's quite a simple, straightforward one. Most of the book came together slowly and organically, as I wrote the individual stories over almost a decade. But at a certain point I began to find connections between them and to think of them as a collection-in-progress; and soon after that I decided there needed to be a story called 'Whirlwind Romance' which would be a keystone for the book and bring all the other stories into a shared design. Of course, that kind of pressure is exactly what you don't need if you want to get a story written, so I ended up worrying at it for ages. I knew what the story was meant to be, but I couldn't get it to happen until I stopped asking so much of it and let it emerge on its own terms.

 When looking back at the stories for the selection did you spot any recurring themes?

I can see nothing but recurring themes! Because I pieced the collection together over a long period, beginning around the time my partner and I had our first child, the book feels to me like a kind of fantastical chronicle of that phase of life. The themes I see are about early parenthood - its intensity and strangeness, and the way children unsettle your relationship with your own younger self; sibling relationships and the way these can form some of the deepest structures of your life and personality; mental illness and the complicated and unsatisfactory ways we have of defining sanity; strange cities and parallel realities; neurodiversity; imaginary books, video games, virtual realities, the relations between the dreams we are prescribed by our culture and those we dream in our deepest private selves. 

What else can we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

At the moment I'm working on a sequel to my novel Wolfstongue (littleisland.ie/books/wolfstongue/)- the new book is provisionally titled The Foxes' Tower and is due to be published by Little Island in the autumn. It's aimed at readers of around 8-12 -- I find this a great readership to write towards, because it calls for a lot of rigour and discipline in storytelling but also for all the colourful adventure and fantasy you can provide. 

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?

This is a very interesting question because it makes me realise that as far as fiction goes, there is no book I'd want to make everyone read. The whole point of reading is to explore on your own terms and discover the books that are meaningful for you in ways they could never be for anyone else. (When teaching, I do tell students what to read, but always with the aim of encouraging them to go on and read voraciously for themselves...)

For non-fiction, though, I'll say The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells, which I'm halfway through right now -- it's a bitter dose of perspective.