Thomas Morris, 29, fled to Dublin as a teen because he “wanted to find an Irish wife”, but has returned to Caerphilly with his first collection of short stories.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, published by Faber and Faber, focuses on characters from Caerphilly and the stories are mainly set in the town.
They deal with coming of age, of ordinary life, mundane jobs and family life, depression, the struggles and oppression of motherhood and more.
For Morris, who attended Ysgol Gymraeg Caerffili and Ysgol Gyfun Cwm Rhymni, they fill a gap, both of his own issues growing up, and of a missing place in literature for ‘normal’ and of the place he grew up.
Morris said: “It was in Caerphilly where I did my growing up. I was here until I was 19, so I associate Caerphilly on a personal level with that idea of coming of age, trying to be an adult and not quite succeeding.”
He added: “I think a lot about TV and often it’s always about costume dramas where people are very wealthy, like Downton Abbey and all that.
“Then on the other side you’ve got the really kind of rough stuff, like Irvine Welsh, with everyone taking drugs and I think there’s whole swathes of Britain which are neither of those two things and it’s normal life. We don’t often see that in fiction.”
The book was launched by Crosskeys’ Costa prize-winning poet Jonathan Edwards at Waterstones in Cardiff on August 29 and the first three stories deal with different ways of coping with “this idea of what does it mean to be an adult”.
Morris said: “When I started writing these stories I was 26. I was just trying to work that out myself, this idea of responsibilities and what responsibilities we want to take on and this idea of freedom.
“Because if you have responsibility, that curtails your freedom in some way, but some responsibilities give you freedom to do things.”
As well as looking, and failing, to find an Irish wife, Morris left Caerphilly to study at Trinity College.
He is now editor of The Stinging Fly magazine but is not sure exactly why he came back to South Wales in his writing.
Morris said: “I was trying to write stories and found in my early attempts they didn’t ring true in any way.
“I just happened to set one in Caerphilly and it seemed to work and then the next one happened to be set in Caerphilly. Things were really coming together so I deliberately started setting stories in Caerphilly.
“They had a resonance and a truth which was more authentic than the stories before which weren’t really set anywhere.”
Morris said he gave little thought to how Caerphilly is represented in his work when writing, focusing more on how people behave.
He said: “I think it’s resonating and people are recognising their own experiences of a small town.
“I know people won’t necessarily agree with the representation of the town but in that case it’s the character’s idea of the town and if the character’s a little depressed then he’s going to see it in a depressed light.
“Place is so personal to everybody and everybody sees it differently, that’s part of the fun and I hope that more people write about the area, not just Caerphilly but the rest of the Rhymney Valley.”
Seems strange… Moving hundreds of miles to try and get a wife. Did he find one?
Good book, well worth a read, perhaps Caerphilly is the main character in the book. Interesting he went to Dublin to find Caerphilly, but most Irish writers did their best work out of Ireland
I will read the book on your advice.
I also left Caerphilly and went to live in Dublin for 6 months. All I found was temple bar.