Dance Move: Wendy Erskine

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For me, Wendy Erskine is the new voice of Northern Ireland and I can’t wait for her next collection!

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. 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. Dance Move” features a married woman whose brother was left paralysed in an accident (and who knows on her parent’s death she will inherit his care) – as she struggles with the developing physicality and nascent sexuality of her teenage daughter. In Memento Mori, Gillian’s partner, Tracey, is slowly dying from cancer. But this has to co-exist with the killing of a teenager in front of their house and the shrine and mourners who come with it. Like a charge between two poles, Erskine traces the frictions between the two deaths; the tragedy, frustration and great irony of people oblivious to others’ inner lives. Gloria and Max” is a short piece about an English Professor of Film who travels to a planning event for a film festival with a carer from a chain of care homes (whose residents are going to be the main audience) and a disconcerting incident that occurs on their journey.Meanwhile, the title story, Dance Move, offers a glimpse into the tense world of Kate, an uptight Belfast parent who's deeply jealous of her daughter Clara's carefree teenhood. Matters come to a head at an under-18 rave – but maybe there's still time for Kate to cut (foot)loose her baggage. There can also be real autobiographical inspiration behind Erskine's work: for example, with Gloria and Max, a new story in which a short car journey takes an unexpected turn for two strangers on their way to a Christian film festival. There’s also a creeping sense of unease in ‘Bildungsroman’ about a teenage boy going to lodge with a stranger, and ‘Max and Gloria’ about an academic going on a road trip with a care home worker.

WE gets to know her characters as the story develops and takes on a momentum of its own – ‘it’s a bit Doris Stokes’. The example of the title story given to the collection is a case in point. In Dance Moves the mother is not able to move with the times. WE hadn’t initially seen that connection 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. I rarely pay any attention to the cover blurb before reading books; I prefer to be surprised instead. In the case of Dance Move, I was thrilled to read after I’d finished the book, that Wendy Erskine is a full-time secondary school teacher. I’d imagine she’s a teacher that teenage me would’ve got on with well. A physical manifestation of Edgar never really appears in her mind. He’s just more of a presence, but what is annoying is how there’s always a radiator in shot. It always sneaks in, the radiator. The only place it didn’t appear was the beach.’Following the prize-winning Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine's Belfast is once again illuminated. Meet Drew Lord Haig, called on to sing an obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Meet Max as he recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. And Mrs Dallesandro who dreams of being a teenager again as she sits in a tanning salon on her wedding anniversary. In these stories, Erskine's characters' wishes and hopes often fall short of their grasp. Brilliantly drawn, Dance Move is about the hugeness of life as seen through glimpses of the everyday. Dance Move is Wendy Erskine’s second collection of short stories. Her previous book was Sweet Home, but this is the first of her work that I’ve read. As a voracious reader who often ploughs through tomes, it’s good practice sometimes for me to slow down and pay close attention. And for Dance Move, taking my time has been more than rewarding. Erskine's stories open slight, but they contain more than it seems possible for short stories to contain' - Keith Ridgway, author of Hawthorn & Child Early on in the story Cell, the main character, Caro, remembers a teenage disco, that it had been: “astounding how other people could move so fluidly; how they were able to discern a beat which she couldn’t hear”. Her flaw comes to be writ larger in the fabric of the story – unable to perform the complex dance of love and openness and vulnerability, Caro’s social unease leads her astray from herself, and into the hands of others. This is my first experience of Wendy Erksine's short stories set in Northern Ireland, and I can only marvel at her abilities to capture people, painting authentic pictures of their characters with so few words and the wide range of circumstances they find themselves in, including within families, their pasts, traumas, feelings, relationships, the unexpected, the tragedies, the idiosyncratic, and the joys. She has a real ear for dialogue, there is dark humour and humanity in her astutely observed, unvarnished and insightful writing. Despite the short length of the stories, Erskine had me totally immersed in the worlds she creates, and the characters and scenarios she imagines.

That’s such a satisfying paragraph, showing me so much about ‘Mrs Dallesandro’ without telling me in so many words. I love it. The men are characterised with equal care, though:Basically, I'm thinking about an idea and characters and trying to get to know the people. It sounds a bit bizarre – because, obviously, how can you get to know people who don't exist? – but it's just trying to get them into view, really. Max Haynes had been in Northern Ireland for just under two months: long enough to know its limitations. Those presented themselves within two days, such as the cultural quarter of Belfast that consisted of a single street. He was there as visiting professor of film. And now he was in his car, driving to a place in the middle of nowhere. Mathematics” – a girl who struggled at school and who now works as a cleaner for various short term rental properties, finds a small girl abandoned in one property and temporarily befriends her – the girls maths homework reminding her of her own difficulties as a child. Max wondered how this woman might feel about being in a car, an enclosed space, with a man she didn’t know. It might make her feel less uneasy if he banged on a bit about Janika. That would establish that he wasn’t a threat, and that Janika was a person who, if not there in physical manifestation, was constantly there in thought.