My stories tend to change hugely between first draft and final draft. How then can you say that it’s the same story, somebody asked me once. Good question, I remember thinking. If the initial characters and plot have fled the scene by the time the story ends, have I not simply abandoned one story for another without the inconvenience of opening a new notebook? To which I can only say that as I write I am chasing a certain core feeling or hunch that builds around an image or series of images, and it is this elusive thing that I follow through various shape-shifting characters and scenarios.
The Smell of Dead Flowers, one of the longer stories in my collection, began in a Tessa Hadley workshop at West Cork Literary Festival in 2012. I was reading Tessa’s collection, Married Love, that week, also William Trevor’s After Rain, and I remember lying on the floor of my room in the Maritime Hotel, starting the story. As part of an exercise we’d been given, I had to incorporate an autobiographical element and so I chose a collection of dead butterflies I had as a child. Back in 2012, the story was called Unending Flight and the opening featured a fanlight, inspired I think by a detail on the cover of Married Love. The story had two characters: a middle-aged man called Maurice and his slightly older sister, Lou Anne.
