A conversation with Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Online Only, May 2025
Over the years, we’ve published a series of casual conversations between writers in Tolka. We have paired authors such as Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, as they have reflected on how they write their books and discuss the fundamental underpinnings of their art, as well as talking about what they’ve had for dinner and seen on the telly recently. We’re now delighted to publish a new conversation between Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh. Lucy and Aimée first met in 2022, when Aimée took Lucy’s Faber Academy course on the short story, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since.
Lucy and Aimée are both writers from Belfast. Lucy is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories published by Faber: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021) and, most recently, Openings (2024). Her most recent novel, These Days (2022) won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (2019). Aimée’s debut novel Exile was published by John Murray Press in 2024. She holds a PhD in Irish Literature and Cultural History, and her academic monograph Writing Resistance in Northern Ireland was published by Liverpool University Press in 2024. Aimée is also an editor at The Mirror, and is working on her second novel.
This conversation took place in early 2025 over Zoom.
Lucy Caldwell (LC): Aimée, how are you doing? Where are you speaking from?
Aimée Walsh (AW): Hi! I’m in Belfast! We’re in the process of moving back to London, but it’s all up in the air. We’re between two places.
LC: It’s funny, isn’t it, the tug between those two places? That’s something I’m very familiar with.
AW: It’s hard because once you move away, coming home is always this thing that you’re dreaming about. Then when you get home, you’re always dreaming about going somewhere else.
LC: Yeah, I think it’s a particular kind of diaspora as well, that sense of being Irish and from the north, in London. I loved living in London. I found it so freeing. Unlike other cities in England where I felt very alien. But I never intended to stay and have children in London, and then when it got too expensive, suddenly I’m living in Folkestone. I always thought that one day I would move home. When we were leaving London I had this sense of horror of raising children in an English suburb, but being by the sea helps, and Folkestone is a very arty, creative place.
AW: I think everybody goes through the push and pull of coming home. A lot of my friends moved to London around 2008 and they’re now thinking about coming back. But they’ve lived in London all of their adult lives. Like, they’ve never rented in Belfast or had a job here, but still, there’s this weird pull.
LC: I can see my fiction trying to accommodate that, and there’s a useful thing about being caught in between places, particularly Belfast and London, where you’re only a ferry ride away. You have the illusion of being so close. It feels so possible to move back and then you have to live in the distance between those places.
AW: It just keeps you suspended, but I like that. I obviously am a Belfast writer, but it feels different because all of my writing has happened in London.
LC: When I was writing my stories in Multitudes, which are all about Belfast girlhood, I realised that I could not have written those stories if I’d continued living in Belfast. This is a silly example, but when I was growing up on the Belmont Road, there was a cafe called The Silver Leaf Cafe. It was like a chip shop and we all went there after we’d done the 11 plus, and then to the Strand cinema to see My Girl. Memories like that are perfectly preserved for me. And these days The Silver Leaf Cafe has changed its name – it’s now just Silver Leaf. But the version of the streets and the places, for me hasn’t been overlaid with new quotidian memories. If I’d been living there and walking past it every day, I would have noticed the change. It would have been harder to psychically access the previous version of it. I realised that, with all my stories in Multitudes, it was the first time that writing in a kind of exile felt like it might have treasures of its own. If I’d been still living in Belfast, I could have written other stories but I wouldn’t have written those stories. Then being in London during lockdown, and suddenly being unable to get home – that’s when I wrote my novel, These Days, about the Belfast Blitz. That was a way of psychically keeping my connection to the city alive.
AW: I wrote Exile during the lockdowns as well, and Belfast was preserved in my head as this little diorama of the city. When I was writing stories after Exile – as you were saying about the slight changes, like a cafe name – there was one that came up where I had written about somebody getting on a bus and about them counting their change out. One of my friends read it and they were like, when was the last time you got a bus in Belfast? They were like: we’ve had tap on for years. I didn’t know. My imagination of Belfast is just perfectly preserved from a different time.
LC: Did writing Exile change your relationship to Belfast?
AW: I don’t know if it did. It felt like a reproduction of what I felt 2007 Belfast was. Did writing Belfast change how you felt about it?
LC: A lot of the stories in Multitudes were my attempt to tell the stories of my youth in a way that I didn’t think had been told, and it was to assert that these stories belonged in a narrative of Belfast. I think that came from leaving Belfast aged eighteen at the millennium. There was a sense that the Troubles were over, we needed to move on, people weren’t interested, and we needed new stories. At least this was the feeling I got time and time again when writing, especially in an English context. There was a sense that people knew the stories that they thought I would tell and they were bored by them. There was a lot to negotiate. For a long time, I didn’t feel that the stories I wanted to tell about Belfast were worthwhile. When I was telling the stories in Multitudes, it felt like I was claiming back the city, I was asserting my right, my characters’ right. Like when I was writing ‘Here We Are’, which is a story of two young women in love, I hadn’t known where to look for such stories. Also, I felt by writing it that I belonged to the city in a different way, even though I’d moved away. I had a similar thing with These Days, I felt it was an assertion that this is my city. I may have moved away, but this is city that I grew up in. This city is part of me.
AW: I had a similar experience because when I went to Liverpool for university in 2008 it was felt that the Troubles was over. When I arrived the people I met at university and beyond weren’t really interested in speaking about the Troubles – but they weren’t taught about it in school so that’s not a fault on them at all. But the Troubles didn’t feel that far away from me, and I’ve written about it in non-fiction. Something that I was dealing with in those periods was how one of my friends in school was murdered by a loyalist paramilitary group, and that was only a couple of years before I went to university. That was percolating through me and through the adolescent version of me. When I went to university, it very much felt like those stories were folded in, it felt like the top of a cardboard box just being closed. When his killers were sentenced I remember going into the living room to a bunch of people from Great Britain and they were like, the Troubles aren’t your badge of honour. So that story was put away for a very long time. It wasn’t until my Master’s supervisor Steffi Lehner brought me to see Anna Burns give a talk at the Lyric after she won the Booker Prize. I remember the way she spoke about Belfast girlhood and the particular experience of writing about living through political violence, living through sexual violence, and coming out the other side. It felt like a key in the door that let me know that I had permission. It was an acknowledgement that these stories matter. Coming home and seeing her give that talk was the impetus to start writing Exile and to start writing in general.
LC: Hilary Mantel said – and I always think about it – the question shouldn’t be which writers inspire you, but which writers give you permission. I love the way you talk about Milkman like that and I think that book is a masterpiece. Also it’s a book that could not have been written in the immediate aftermath of lived experience. It needed a quarter of a century for that experience to distil and be wrought in words that you just couldn’t write in the immediate aftermath.
AW: Trauma needs time to percolate for somebody, and for society in general, to have the words to talk about it. I remember reading Medbh McGuckian giving an interview with Michaela Schrage-Früh, about Henri Matisse’s paintings, which inspired her poem, ‘Drawing Ballerinas’. She said that the painter spent the worst years of the war painting images of ballerinas dancing, in all these joyful but elegant images. He didn’t have the capacity at the time for the horrors that were going on around him. I don’t know whether we’re [northern writers] coming through that, where literature from Belfast is engaging with the Troubles in a very fresh way. I think of Michael Magee’s Close to Home. His engagement with austerity post-Good Friday Agreement is just really fresh and exciting.
LC: Definitely. I was thinking about the interesting ways that time lets us reassess. One of the greatest gifts about motherhood – I don’t think that you need to become a mother to have this opportunity, but certainly for me – is that we’re always talked about in terms of generations. Sometimes the generational fracture lines don’t map neatly onto your own experience – like I think I’m technically a geriatric millennial, I grew up just before mobile phones. But if you have a child, then from one day to the other you are literally immediately, irrevocably a member of a new generation. I felt this so strongly with each of my children, and I think it’s no coincidence that I wrote my stories in Multitudes after having my son. It was so important to realise that you have a child and start thinking of the ways that you’re going to bring that child up…
It’s so interesting when we think of generational trauma and how that gets passed on, and these moments that we can reassess how we were brought up and what we took for granted. Suddenly everything looks strange and you see your parents in a new way and instead of being to blame or invincible, you see your parents as just struggling with these circumstances. One of my stories in Intimacies directly spoke to that. It’s called ‘Words for Things’, and it starts off with two mums at a baby swimming class discussing Monica Lewinsky and realising that she was only twenty-two when she had the affair with Bill Clinton and how that is so young. Suddenly you get a like a kaleidoscopic, new perspective on things. I have found that very interesting purely as a function of time. I think this has been something that collectively we’ve been working through. The fact that a sexual encounter can be one thing at the time and can be something radically different ten or twenty years later. The new ways we have of seeing and of understanding and the new vocabularies we have can radically change how we interpret or understand something that happened even if we thought we understood it at the time.
AW: Yeah, it’s the same thing as the trauma that, given space and time, it settles on you. You develop a new language and a new sight on what has happened. In the post-Me-Too movement, all of these horrendous sexual power imbalances between, for example, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, or in the Epstein cases, brings a new realisation or a new clarity to how twisted these interactions were and are, as they remain happening. It gives clarity that in the space between then and now we have begun to develop language to be able to tackle those things retrospectively. I don’t know if we’re at that stage yet to be able to manage it completely; there’s still the whisper network…
LC: Do you think of your characters as real people?
AW: Yeah, I do. It feels like a sort of madness. When I was writing Exile, Fiadh appeared as a separate character, like a separate person to me. It was nearly like I could see her interacting with the world. I could imagine what she would do and say. It was like she was a vision thought. That’s how Elena Ferrante imagines her characters. They become like thought-visions for her.
LC: How do you first sense them? Do you see them or do you hear them?
AW: I see them; it’s like a cinema screen in front of me where I can see a scene. That’s how they first arrive in my head. Then I note down what they’re doing or what they’re wearing. I don’t ever see their faces, which is strange. I can’t ever imagine what Fiadh, or this new character I’m currently writing, looks like, but I can nearly see their energy. That sounds a bit wishy washy, but I can see how they would react to things. The next stage, I can hear dialogue, I can hear their voice. With Fiadh, I could hear the dialogue between her and her friends and how she would respond so clearly. It was like putting a glass up to the wall and listening in on their conversations. What about you, how do you come about characters?
LC: Yeah, I hear them. I’m notorious for getting lost. Quite often when I’m walking along, I will just be letting characters talk in my head. I’ll be hearing what they’re saying, trying to tune in and capture the rhythms of their speech.
AW: That’s how I write as well, where it’s all about their feelings and being inside their head, looking out as opposed to what their face looks like or what height they are. It’s very much their thoughts about the world as opposed to thoughts about themselves. I find it really difficult to picture a face. I just can’t do it. I would love to be the sort of writer who could picture those little details, but I can’t. I’m more interested in the electricity that they feel with the world. We talked at the start about Belfast fiction. Do you think it’s having a moment?
LC: One of my favourite things is seeing the city completely new and fresh. I cannot speak highly enough of Wendy Erskine’s forthcoming novel, The Benefactors. It is absolutely brilliant. It feels completely fresh, new, and true to Belfast. Yet it’s a Belfast that that hasn’t existed in fiction before, maybe apart from in the stories of Wendy Erskine. Irish or Northern Irish or even Belfast writing is having a golden moment – I think that the more versions of something there are, the more permission that gives for other versions to exist. It just kind of blossoms, fractal style.
AW: I’ve just finished another Belfast writer, Gráinne O’Hare’s Thirst Trap, which is coming out in June. It’s brilliant. It’s about three young women housemates in Belfast and they’ve had a falling out. The fourth housemate has gone out and has died. And then the other three begin renegotiating their relationship. It has such a beautiful balance between humour and heartbreak. It’s phenomenal, my novel of the year. She’s just such a delicate and beautiful writer. What have you been reading?
LC: I loved Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics. She’s such a brilliant writer. It was published by Tramp Press and it is charming and devastating and messy and funny and sharp and completely winsome.
AW: I loved that one too!
LC: I’ve actually watched quite a bit of good TV lately. We saw After the Party, the New Zealand drama. The acting is just phenomenal. It’s about a woman who, very drunk at a party, sees her husband comforting a sick teenager in a way that she suddenly thinks he’s a paedophile, and then everyone else thinks that too. He’s very well respected in the community, so it’s very intense character drama about the fallout of this and then her doubting herself but yet something in her is sure of what she saw even though she didn’t really see anything and her daughter of course won’t speak to her anymore. And then recently, like literally this week, I realised that I’ve never actually seen any or many Rodgers and Hammerstein films. The Sound of Music would be one of my favourite films, but I’ve never actually seen The King and I, Carousel, South Pacific, Oklahoma. I feel that I have because the songs from them are such cultural references. I’ve just been watching Oklahoma, and it’s not at all what I expected. It was one of those real reminders of don’t assume that you know something.
AW: I would never have been somebody who would sit down and watch a film. But going to the cinema has been something, since I’ve moved back to Belfast in the last year, I’m going to the cinema two or three times a week and it’s been such a joy. I’ve been going to the classics and educating myself. I saw The Godfather for the first time a couple of months ago. I think I was the only person who was in that room who was viewing it for the first time and recognising it from memes. But it’s interesting though to recognise it from little three second clips you would see on Twitter or Instagram. And it’s a three-hour movie! I thought I knew what it was going to be. I knew the blurb of it and I felt that that was enough, but it wasn’t. It’s brilliant. And I’ve been going back to classic literature as well. I’m reading Anna Karenina. I knew vaguely what happens, and sometimes you just make your peace with that. It’s like the Sixth Sense Syndrome; you know the twist at the end, so you feel like you never have to go and actually see or read it. But now I’m reading Anna Karenina, and it’s just the most rewarding experience. I adore it. I’m eking out the chapters, making it last as long as it can. I’m trying to do that instead of watching Married at First Sight Australia which takes up a lot of my time. I think that’s probably the first time that Tolstoy and Married at First Sight are ever going to be in the same sentence.
