Thomas’s stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published and anthologised in a number of venues, including Zoetrope, Granta, Best European Fiction, and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story ,edited by Philip Hensher. If someone is struggling to find a good writing routine or are concerned about the nature of their own process, I would really recommend reading Daily Routines. So many writers were lunatics in the way they settled down to work, but the routine was everything. Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ Ali Smith, Guardian ‘Books of the Year’

Have you had much input into the production of the book as a finished product? What did you make of the cover art? Was it what you were expecting or envisioning for the book – did you even have an expectations or visions for it at all? I was, I suppose, just playing with writing, not really sure what I was doing. The first summer I went home, and I entered a local short story competition.I wrote a story when I was in TCD, submitted it to the college literary magazine, and it got published. When I went to the launch of that issue of the magazine, I was quite shy and nervous, and was told that no one wanted to run the Literary Society, and then asked would I be interested. I said that I didn’t want to, but that I’d help make posters. Many interviewers have made much of your identity as a Welsh writer living in Ireland – do you think this is problematic? How do you identify yourself? How should we identify ourselves? If we should at all… A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother figure for a fleeting sexual encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town’s summer festival…Thomas Morris’ debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. These entertaining stories portray the lives of the people who know where they are, but don’t know what they’re doing. We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris – eBook Details Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyces’s original to mark its centenary.

The humour that frequently underpins descriptions of his characters also appears in his realistic yet engaging dialogue. Some of it is reminiscent of the wordplay that characterises Lorrie Moore’s writing: when a Dolly Parton cd is put on, there’s a debate about whether it’s “Greatest Tits” or “The Breast Of”; a character wearing a potato fancy dress costume is asked if they have “‘a chip on your shoulder, do you?’” One characters laments that: “‘I can’t believe we’re twenty-seven. Innit sad thinking about all the things we’ll never do? I was thinking about it the other day. Like, at this age, I’ll never be a victim of paedophilia.’” It’s a well-observed story, not just in terms of the activities of the group of lads – the drinking games, the fancy-dress outfits that can come with these occasions, the interplay and banter, but also the eye for detail that helps to make We Don’t Know What We’re Doing Together such a good read:You’ve said the key to a good short story is intensity – what kind of intensity do you strive for in your own work? It wasn’t like that at all,” he says, shaking his head with a disarming smile on his face. We believe him – absolutely, totally. That’s a good question. In the opening story, ‘Bolt’, the narrator escapes to the bathroom to take some time out, then he goes to take a piss and remembers he doesn’t actually need a piss: he’s just there to have some peace. A friend of mine said he liked that moment, though he felt it was clearly taken directly from real life. It made me pause for a bit. I wondered if a detail could be ‘too real’. And it is something I think about a lot: is this or that detail too idiosyncratic? I have a few friends to whom I show early drafts, and a big part of the drafting process is wheedling out the bits that take the reader out of the reading experience. So I use statistical analysis: if one friend things something isn’t quite working, it’s worth considering but it might stay in; if three people point their finger to the same thing, I know it needs tinkering or removing. Most often, though, people point out the things you always suspected yourself. Once you think that something is get-away-with-able, it never actually is. Set in Caerphilly, a sleepy castle town in South Wales, Thomas Morris’ debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. By turns poignant, witty, and tender – these entertaining stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don’t know what they’re doing.

I read two great debut short story collections last year – Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin, which was last month’s Irish Times Book Club choice; and We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris, which is this month’s Irish Times Book Club choice. Between 2014 and 2016 (Issues 28, 29, 30, 32 and 34), he was Editor of The Stinging Flymagazine. He is now Editor at Large and runs their writer development programme. Editor of The Stinging Fly, one of Ireland’s top literary magazines, Thomas Morris is no stranger to reading and writing short fiction. In the final countdown to the deadline for our short story competition we spoke to the writer and editor about his debut collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, heritage, habits and the art of disguise.These perceptive, melancholic stories are set in the small Welsh town of Caerphilly. The characters are aimless and lonely, unsure of themselves. They are all trying to figure life out and discovering that there are no easy answers. I am so bored of contemporary fiction's stream of novels about over-educated, sassy metropolitan writers trying to write novels (and their conversations with their sassy confidants and lovers about the difficulties they face writing novels) - see Cusk, Lerner, Heti, etc, etc. I genuinely feel that the dilemmas a novelist faces are not universal or even that interesting. I'm not sure there's much any of us can learn from the effusions of creative writing tutors in Williamsburg coffee shops. Take me to Planet Earth, please. Dubliners 100 was a good starter test - from being on the other side with that, talking to authors, having conversations with the publishers, and all the concerns about how it was going to be marketed.

In Clap Hands the gruelling life as a single mother of Amy, a nursery worker, is poignantly depicted. After her husband remortgages their home and absconds to Australia to find himself, Amy is caught between the demands of her ailing mother and her three children. She emerges as a modern heroine, refusing to take out her loss on the next generation. But the ‘disguising’ you mention is a big part of the fun. I like to take a detail from life, then try to shape a story around it. This is especially true when it comes to stories driven by the details of strong emotional impulses. The story ‘Fugue’ came from the horror of being away from home for a long time and then returning and feeling distinctly alien. Previous to working at The Stinging Fly, Morris interned at two of Ireland’s most notable independent publishers: Liberties Press and Lilliput Press. There’s a tendency in Britain to go, ah, aren’t the Irish great with their oral storytelling tradition, as if that’s where [the success] comes from. It’s hard work. One thread of the magazine’s history in the 25 years since it was set up is the growth of the Arts Council [of Ireland] in that time. In Britain, the arts are still up for question – like, should we support them? Whereas in Ireland it feels like they’re important a priori – we’re going to support them. If I’m a writer in Wales wanting to send out work, where do I go? In Ireland, I could send it to the Dublin Review, Banshee, Gorse, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly. More and more writers from Britain look to get their start here because there aren’t necessarily those outlets in the UK. The tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris's debut short-story collection, We Don't Know What We're Doing, set primarily in the Welsh town of Caerphilly. The troubled, centreless narrators drift through the everyday in search of meaning. They are mostly young – teenagers to twentysomethings – and their listlessness says much about a society that has lost direction. As editor of the Stinging Fly magazine and last year's Dubliners 100 anthology (Tramp Press), Morris may be known to Irish readers already. A native of Caerphilly, he studied at Trinity College and lives in Dublin.

Tellingly, his older sister had completed a Creative Writing Masters, and his brother a Creative Writing degree. For starters, instead of a debut novel he had a debut batch of short stories – stories that didn’t necessarily adhere to conventional structures. PDF / EPUB File Name: We_Dont_Know_What_Were_Doing_-_Thomas_Morris.pdf, We_Dont_Know_What_Were_Doing_-_Thomas_Morris.epub Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and not just a book of the year for me but one of the most satisfying collections I’ve read for years.’ Ali Smith, Guardian