Interview with Seán Padraic Birnie
Seán Padraic Birnie writes subtle, lovely stories where niggling worries that follow us down the street or down the hall reveal themselves to be all-consuming horrors. His book I Would Haunt You If I Could is available from Undertow Press. He’s published stories in places like The Dark, Interzone, Black Static, and ergot. A couple of great short stories free to read online are “Cold Reading” and “Funny Faces.”
In many of your stories, a body behaves unpredictably. As in “Holes,” a newly hole-y character asks himself, “What if the holes were only like the pus of some infection…outward symbols of an obscure disorder?” On behalf of all your characters with obscure disorders, I ask…how did they get so sick?
I’m interested in sickness in general, I think, in the vulnerability of the body, and in part this has grown out of my own experiences with chronic pain, depression, and, more recently M.E. (which in my case may or may not be long Covid). But I’ve been interested in horror for much longer than that, and of course the body in various sorts of pain is a longstanding theme in the genre. But, even absent sickness as a theme, the body has interested me in this regard—there’s just something very strange about bodies (and minds, and people as such). I’ve always felt a certain discomfort in that, and I think discomfort, or unease, is perhaps the thing I’m interested in most of all. Body horror is one way of throwing that kind of discomfort into sharp relief.
The dead sometimes come back to life in your stories, but they generally aren’t celebrated like Lazarus. They often aren’t vengeful, either. More likely, they’re simply in the way. What fears are reflected here about death/grief?
The father’s return in my story “Out of the Blue” was actually inspired by a glitch in one of the FIFA football games on PlayStation. I’d had a player (Sergio Ramos, I think) sent off… but he didn’t leave the pitch. He just stayed in position, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, stretching, cycling through all the little animations. Occasionally the ball would bounce off him—other players had to run around him. At the end of the game, as the camera panned around the empty stadium, he was still there, alone, staring into space. At some point that year, following my grandfather’s death, I helped my own father empty the loft in my grandfather’s house, and that experience connected with the weird, indifferent blankness of Sergio Ramos in the PlayStation glitch.
Which, it occurs to me, doesn’t really answer your question. I suppose, for me, it reflects all the fears. There are ever so many. Perhaps most of all the idea of a kind of blockage, of getting stuck—grief as a trap, a place without horizon or escape.
What were your earliest experiences with the horror genre? Were you primed to be a horror fan before you encountered it (any weird fears)?
Possibly Halloween. I loved the Little Vampire series of books, and Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Funny Bones, then, later, some of the Point Horror novels. Then Stephen King, then everything. The genre’s iconography seemed to express something essential about the world, about the logic of the world—predation, vulnerability, grief & loss, exploitation, displacement, disorientation, estrangement. I was also quite an anxious child, I think.
Here’s a moving passage from the story “Funny Faces”:
The girl realises that the father does not know what has happened. This simultaneously appals and reassures the girl. For how, on the one hand, can the father not know what has happened? How can he appear so indifferent to this awful thing that has happened to her? But then, if he does not know what happened, perhaps it did not happen after all. Perhaps she can forget.
This is such a realistic depiction of how easy it can be to deny something traumatic. Does horror help us come to terms with trauma?
I’m not sure. Perhaps it helps some people in that respect. I don’t tend to find it particularly soothing. But I am interested in that kind of denial. Horror would struggle without repression!
Does writing fiction cure your existential angst? If not…any other tips?
Oh no, not at all. But it’s nice, when working on something, to play with it, to see what you can make of it. Once you’re working with it, some of its power seems to wane. It’s only ever temporary. Every time I finish a short story I feel like I’ll never write anything again.
And it’s nice, as a reader, to recognise one’s own experience in the work of strangers. I found a sort of comfort, for example, in some of Thomas Ligotti’s work when I was severely depressed, and it was interesting to learn that he himself had suffered from anhedonia. Working at a UK university while depressed had a definite Ligottian vibe.
What writers have had the greatest impact on you? On what aspect of your writing?
Borges. M John Harrison for the texture and specificity of his prose. Ezra Pound & imagism were a big influence on the way I thought about writing in my early twenties, which may have been something of a misappropriation. I was obsessed with Stephen King as a young teenager, and Neil Gaiman. M.R. James. Michael Ende and Tolkien, in terms of actually wanting to write. I think my earliest efforts were attempts at ripping off Tolkien. Alan Garner. Very early on I loved Angela Sommer-Bodenburg’s Little Vampire.
How do you overcome the challenges of writer’s block?
Poorly, most often… Reading is always key. I often find switching devices—from screen to paper, or from one programme to another—quite useful; changes in context. I use OmmWriter and Ulysses and Scrivener on a Mac. Writing by hand currently seems the most promising method for me – I feel like I’m coming out of a very dry period at the moment—because my laptop is of course spring-loaded with distractions, and I often find it very hard to settle.
Another thing, which I have to always remind myself to do, is that it can be useful, when you’re struggling, to just spend time with your own work. Reread and revise unpublished stories - continue to send things out to magazines.
Sometimes giving up can help, too—sometimes it’s the pressure to write that gets in the way of actual writing. I’m very bad at deciding that any given day is a time I’m going to write. It’s often been the case that, once I give up, go away to do something else, that the writing arrives. Often after a nap.
Do you participate in any other art forms? How do they inform your writing?
I did an MA in Photography at the University of Brighton, where I currently work as a technical demonstrator, and my interests in photography really grew out of my interests in writing—in themes such as time, presence, ghosts, media, repetition, and so on. Which has always fed back into my writing, most directly in stories such as ‘Lucida’ and ‘Other Houses’. Since the pandemic those interests have rather waned, due to burn-out at work, but at some point it’s something I would like to get back into. The MA, in particular, was excellent for my writing—it gave me something else to procrastinate over. I wrote a novelette, “The Window in the Forest,” which will soon be out from Interzone, as a digital bonus, with a perfect illustration by Dante Luiz, almost entirely because I wanted to avoid writing my dissertation. (The dissertation, which I’m now too embarrassed to read, may be found here, for anyone who likes to suffer and/or point and laugh.)
Thanks to Seán!