Dance Move: Wendy Erskine

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When Linda went into the amusement place she saw that the ghost train was still there. A straggly little queue waited to be not very scared. She put her money in the machine to get a metal cascade of tokens and then she tried a couple of the Penny Falls machines, losing and winning and losing again. There were bells ringing, electronic squelches from the machines, disco music echoing in the big hall. She thought of Mike and Rae in the Wellness Centre at the Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun." The wonderfully titled ‘Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun’ features a trip to Portrush that set off a few memories of a rainy afternoon of my own, whilst ‘Nostalgie’ about a faded singer went a direction I didn’t expect. (“He swallows the vocals, embarrassed and impatient to be done, looking with envy at that balloon, aloof, where the wall meets the ceiling.’) I loved the local vernacular when it popped up and some of the settings could only be in the north of Ireland.

I wondered if I was covering the same ground or the same ideas again. Initially, that was a bit off-putting, because I would stop and I would start – and then you just realise that there's no point thinking like that otherwise no-one would ever do anything. This was the February mystery book (which arrived beautifully wrapped in red tissue paper). ‘Dance Move’ is a collection of 11 short stories by Wendy Erskine who lives in Belfast. I don’t often read short stories, partly I think because their length does not allow for enough character development. However I was very pleasantly surprised by Dance Move. I read one story each evening and enjoyed them all. And each one remains vivid in my mind. A number of times whilst reading these stories I remembered the old adage about not to be judging a person before walking a mile in their shoes. With small details, Wendy Erskine does a fine job of writing these characters in a way that you don’t sit in judgement on them, as their thoughts and feelings seem all too real. I can’t recommend this collection or the previous 'Sweet Home' enough. Hi, he said, once she had got in beside him, I’m Max, and even though I have no idea how to get to this place I’ve got the satnav to help us.The storytelling is powerfully underplayed, and that power rests in what’s implied rather than said explicitly. As a writer, I recognise the immense talent needed to achieve this, and how essential this skill is in the toolkit of the teller of excellent short stories. Dear reader, welcome to Dance Move, which delivers in spades. Am I disappointed to be giving this collection a 3-star rating? Absolutely. I really thought Dance Move was going to be a sure winner, especially since I loved Sweet Home so much. But alas, twas not meant to be. It's a lot of fun to do because you are writing without restrictions. Obviously, I am writing lots more than I actually need and I can be moving all over the place – between different locales or even shifting narrative style the whole way through it. Wendy is one of the country’s leading short story writers. Her debut collection, Sweet Home was published by The Stinging Fly Press in September 2018 and Picador in 2019, and has been translated into Italian and Arabic and optioned for TV. It won the 2020 Butler Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2019 and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019. The story ‘Inakeen’ was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Prize 2019. Sweet Home was Book of the Year in the Guardian, The White Review, Observer, New Statesman, and TLS. In the title story – one of the most powerful in the book – Kate disapproves of her teenage daughter’s provocative dancing; she prefers to watch videos of ballet repeatedly. However, it is when she is given the opportunity to dance that Kate finds herself caught between her will to express herself and her urge to suppress.

In this collection (like the first all set in Northern Ireland) in addition I felt there was a sense of life lived elsewhere – another place, another time or by other people or other generations.Mrs Dallesandro” – is about a trip the wife of a well known Italian-origin solicitor takes to get ready for a party, remembering an encounter she had as a teenager with a boy with bad burns Gloria! he said, not loud enough. Gloria! he shouted. It sounded ridiculous, like some kind of dreadful Van Morrison tribute act. Gloria! I've been a teacher since 1993 and I really, really enjoy it as a job," enthuses Erskine, who taught English in Glasgow and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne before moving home to Belfast in the late 1990s.