Do you have any influences?
Definitely Wallace Stevens, and I have a fascination with Macbeth; I love reading Shakespeare’s soliloquies. I think a lot of the nuances of language from then is fairly inaccessible to us but the parts where Shakespeare drops in poems, they feel like they were written just a short time ago.
There are writers who wrote in the 1960s who to me feel so archaic that they might as well have been writing in the 1860s. There is a kind of magic that someone could write such a long time ago, in the 1600s, and still connect with what is going on today.
What about local influences?
I have written about my local influences, so Martin Mooney would be a big influence as well as Miriam Gamble. Leontia Flynn would have been my favourite poet when I was an undergraduate student.
When you pull everything together, your life, your grandfathers, being an electrician, university, your poetic influences; how did you go about writing a collection?
A friend said recently that he felt I had thrown him under the bus because when he asked me, “Did you feel the need to write about The Troubles?” I hadn’t quite answered the way he thought I would have answered that question. This was during a reading and I had to condense my answer from something that was actually a long conversation.
For me, the standard way the media — the Daily Mirror or the BBC, even the Belfast Telegraph– write about The Troubles, It’s conveyed as some sort of morbid fascination. But where I grew up, it was just the way things were. It was just there all the time, and you can resist it or you can go down that route of morbid fascination or you can find a different way to convey the ideas, issues, or the thoughts that you had about the situation you were experiencing.
One of the central themes in my work is the sense of the post-Troubles or late Troubles period which has stayed with me and I want to convey elements of that period of life generally .
What might that look like?
A little while ago I was bringing my partner’s friends, who were from France, to see the murals. There is a tour I take people on, and I saw a friend of mine in the shop where he works and he asked me what I was doing and when I told him, he couldn’t understand why I would want to do that.
I think the murals to him did not fit into a particularly noble idea, or a particularly good period of history. I think his view was that this is not a history worth remembering, but for me it is still history and it is still important. His view was that the Troubles was a “history of dickheads”. But all history is the history of dickheads.
What about themes?
I think there is something in my work which again brings us back to this idea, this fallacy, that Protestants don’t engage with the arts or they don’t write. I think that it is better understood, and this is particularly relevant to the region of the economy that I write into, and that writers like Micky Magee write into I mean big English publishers, where the audience might be people who would read the Guardian, There haven’t been that many writers from working class backgrounds from here who get get access to that audience … maybe Glenn Patterson but there are very few.
Another theme would be language and phonetics, the sound of things, the sound of how people talk. And because my partner is from France, I think the idea of the Irishman in France is in there as well. Being flung from a working class Belfast upbringing into a completely different milieu — middle class France, and all the experiences that come with that, especially the attitude towards food, finds its way into my writing.
Finally, I think aesthetics, and I don’t mean “the way things look”, rather the questions of what is deemed good and useful and what is judged bad and unhelpful.
If you would like to see more of Scott McKendry’s Work go to the following link – x.com/al_mac_e
