“AS A reader you want to hear about other lives, but you need to see that you too are worth something, that you and your community deserve to be at the literary top level. Representation matters. Working class voices are still struggling for representation in a middle class industry.”
So said the 2020 Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart, when interviewed by the Galway Advertiser earlier this year, and it is a view with which Galway based author, Moya Roddy - who is about to launch a new collection of working-class stories - would concur.
“Middle-class voices continue to dominate what's published today, partly because this reflects the world-view of the majority of those in publishing,” she says. “Culture is a powerful tool and ordinary working-class people need to see themselves reflected back in all their richness, complexity, and tenacity of spirit against often overwhelming odds. So yes, there's a definite need for more working-class voices!”
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Moya’s new short story collection, Fire In My Head, which explores working class life, will be published by Culture Matters, and have a live-stream launch on Thursday October 14 at 8pm on Youtube and Facebook, hosted by Charlie Byrne's Bookshop.
'Working-class lives are just as interesting'
Fire In My Head explores working class strength and potential through friendship, community, and solidarity, such as in ‘Doctor’s Orders’, where a mother fights to get the right treatment; the joy-rider in ‘Going Nowhere’ who protects his selectively mute half-sister; the single parent being bullied at work in ‘I Also Had My Hour’; or the elderly woman whose life does an about-turn in ‘They Also Serve Who Only’.
“No one bats an eye at the millions of middle-class novels or collections published,” says Moya, “yet bizarily novels or stories in working-class settings are perceived as ‘niche’ - of limited interest - unlike middle-class stories which are seen as universal, for everyone. Working-class lives are just as interesting, complex, and mysterious, and I hope Fire In My Head goes a little way in showing this.”
The guest speaker at the launch will be poet Rachael Hegarty. For more information see Charlie Byrne’s Facebook page or www.charliebyrnes.ie
