This week on The Prompt on RTÉ Radio 1, all of the submissions are themed around 'Irrevocable Change' - listen above.
Writer Lucy Caldwell set the prompt, as she said it took her year to write a short stories before anything worked... "It took me quite a while to realise that something need to be fundamentally different after the story ends," she says, "and thinking of this as a process of irrevocable change, that means that something has changed in the reader as well as in the writer.’
Born in Belfast, Lucy is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three collections of short stories, Multitudes, Intimacies, and most recently Openings (Faber, 2024), and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019).
Three pieces were selected from the following shortlist for broadcast:
L Fahy - Six, Double Two, Seven, Six, Landline Disconnected
D O’Neill - Man’s Best Friend
D Roycroft - The Laugh (for Claire)
E O Donohue Oddy - Pizza Dance
M Armstrong - The Cold Heart
J Redmond - Notice Is Hereby Given
C MacCarthy: Nightingale in Ravenna
Z Devlin: Sole Survivor
In conversation with presenter Zoë Comyns, Lucy says the power of Loretta Fahy’s sonnet Six, Double Two, Seven, Six, Landline Disconnected "is in its muted understatement. It’s about the phone conversations between (presumably) a mother and an adult child who has moved away from home and it comes at grief prosaically, elliptically – we’re not in the bewildering raw first ravages of bereavement, but in its muted aftershocks, the sort that come years later, and out of nowhere."
Six, Double Two, Seven, Six, Landline Disconnected
Down that line from far away most anytime she’d answer.
Wait in for your call, take ridiculous levels of interest in your
small goings on - remember that your throat was sore last time.
Writer Loretta Fahy said: "The weekly calls with my mother- mostly talking about the minutiae of things like the weather and other small details of home life - had in fact kept you tethered to somewhere solid as I'd gadded around out there. After she was gone, access to the extraordinary stream of caring she’d sent down that telephone line over all of the years, was no more."
Lucy says this poem shows that ‘it’s the talking itself that’s the important thing, not what’s said."
The second piece in the episode is Pizza Dance by Ellen O’Donohue Oddy and Lucy says it’s "ambitious in its form, flipping between its two main characters in the second-person (‘You Grace" and "You Jen") - this story follows two old college friends, both now mums, on a night out meant to rekindle a friendship, which ends in the realisation that the two of them have grown apart too much."
You Jen feel sobered by the sight of Grace and hope the dark mesh of the dancefloor pulls her away.
You Grace feel the heat of your cubicle friend return and you keep doing the pizza dance as his body brushes up against yours.
You Jen think his attention is exactly what Grace wants, not you, not anymore.
You Grace need water. Maybe you’ve taken too much.
You Jen push the door to the exit and open your taxi app.
You Grace feel the grip of his hands clasp around your own.
Ellen O’Donohue Oddy says that "Lucy's prompt was an amazing way into this story, because I had to think about what would truly mark the ending of a friendship, a signal that something had changed irrevocably. Female friendships are bound by this deep integral sisterhood, where we protect and defend each other. For Jen, her priorities in life have shifted, and she realised that she no longer cares about Grace’s safety. After consciously leaving Grace in a dangerous situation, she loses something that can never be retrieved."
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Listen to last week's episode of The Prompt - 'Embarassment' with Caoilinn Hughes
The final piece in the programme, The Cold Heart, is written by Maggie Armstrong. The pieces in this programme were selected blind but Lucy Caldwell, on realising that Armstrong was the writer of The Cold Heart said "Old Romantics (Maggie’s short story collection) was is one of my favourite debut collections of recent years... There’s a characteristic dark jagged energy, this really potent rawness to a lot of what Maggie Armstorng writes."
She looked with flaring shock as he searched the cluttered darkness for his gloves; the lightbulb was gone. Everything was disordered, the floor cheap and ugly. She wanted to live elsewhere. She’d always thought they would buy property.
‘Goodbye Bridget. I have enjoyed our time together.’
She brought her hands to her face.
Lucy says The Cold Heart cuts right in: "It’s a clever interpretation of the brief, showing us not the break-up in its entirety, but honing in on the final blow, the snuffing of the final glimmer of hope – this is exactly what short stories can do brilliantly, working with a weight of ‘backstory’ without having to set it all out."
The Prompt airs on Sundays 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1 and wherever you get your podcasts - listen back here.
