Interviews on the Literary Fiction Network

Irishtaf

This week we are excited to bring you an interview with Thomas irishtaf, a winner of the 2016 Watty's! All his works - yes, all of them - can be found in our reading lists, and we encourage readers to take a look. The Watty's victor was The Hanging of the Swings of Versailles, under the category New Voices!

Now, you've probably received many congratulation messages and comments for your recent Watty's award, and of course, we offer the same. Tell us about receiving the award – did you have any warning or idea prior? Have there been any solid or quantifiable changes that have occurred for you since receiving the award? And of course, the community would like to know your thoughts and feeling.

I certainly had no warning or hints that the award was coming. In fact, I had submitted the collection of short stories earlier in the year when living in the USA, and then immediately afterward went through a dramatic uprooting where my wife and I moved multiple times, had to find a temporary home for our beloved cats, and finally ended up on quite an adventure over in the Orient, living and teaching. So I'd been away from Wattpad for the better part of the summer and fall, unable to stay aground in the community while lost in transition and translation.

One morning not long ago, on this island where we live now, I awoke from a seemingly innocent dream in which my cat brought home a puppy for a playmate. When I went out to make breakfast I found emails of congratulations for winning a Watty! So maybe that's how I should look at the whole scenario, like a new puppy. Awards like these have inspiration about them, potential, direction. Other types of awards can vault you into a place where your work thereafter is hindered by unoriginal mainstream boxes. The cute puppy growing worse than the hound of Hades in chains of adamant. The Watty's, however, in my estimation, are all about promise.

As far as quantifiable changes go, I suppose the collection has been put onto numerous reading lists since the awards came out. Much more than before, so there's been an increase in a "great perhaps" as John Green might propose.

Nothing like getting a cute puppy and all the fun that comes with it! What inspired you to name your collection "The Hanging of the Swings of Versailles"? Your other works also have peculiar names. As somewhat of an aside, our Litfic staff often misread your titles – one of our members even called it "The Hanging Gardens of Versailles."

Haha! Well, maybe for just that reason. To keep you on your toes. But honestly, I think the title could have been much simpler for people. I do like simple titles: Don DeLillo's "Underworld;" Kafka's "The Castle;" etc. But if you ask me they earned those titles. The greater the story the more humdrum the title can be. Now perhaps I'm being a bit facetious here, but there's some small nugget of wisdom as well. With "The Hanging of the Swings of Versailles," I decided on something awkward, and particularly so, I think, for young American audiences. Versailles isn't exactly an easy word to decipher. So in terms of readership it probably doesn't pass the eye test. Too stuffy, too hard to pronounce, too long. But my hope is that after reading the short story, whether coming to it on a whim or by word of mouth or whathaveyou, one would have a more intimate connection to the title. There's a sense of karmic pain that infiltrates the central protagonist, in more ways than one. There's multiple family tragedies – blood tragedies, if you will – that speak on a material level through the analogy of the double helix as juxtaposed with the chains from the swingset. There's a sort of otherworldly messenger in the form of the postcard of Versailles, and maybe the shadow of otherworldly characters in the form of the man in the yellow raincoat. So the title really implicates all of those, and how the so-called karma was draped in the first place into the emotional body of the protagonist. And, of course, there's also a reference to the tragic ending of the story as well. The title just came to me after writing it, and I thought, "that's it."