Q&A with Paul Coomey

If you live somewhere currently experiencing the stifling heat of summer, we have a snowy, frigid, decidedly well-written treat for you! And if you’ve got cold weather this time of year, blessings to you, here’s some more. “The New Coat” by Paul Coomey captures how profound moments can sometimes happen in the quiet, in solitude, and as natural and sure as the coming snow. The interview for this piece was done over Zoom, between Coomey and Sophia Blush, one of our editors.

Edited for the purposes of print 

This story is a great example of how a title can shift the focus of a story to one particular thing. You could easily have made the focus of the story the snow or the loss that the main character is going through. How did you land on the title “The New Coat?”

Well I suppose you kind of answered the question in the question. I didn’t want the focus to be on the snow or the loss. I have a question for you before I answer your question, if that’s okay.

Sure.

Who is “he”? 

I understood him to be probably her partner or her husband.

Yeah, that’s what most people think. Yes, he could be. Absolutely.

But I wasn’t totally sure.

So, I thought I was being very clever, and I have written it, I think, in such a way where it could be her partner, absolutely. But, it would be more tragic if it was her son, and it would also be tragic if it was her father. So, it’s deliberately ambivalent. But at the beginning it was him, and then I was like, “if I talk about a partner, then I’m gonna have to talk maybe more about his presence.” I didn’t really want to talk about that, because it’s about a step forward for her. I think the coat is massively symbolic, isn’t it? Cause there’s a lot of talk about textures in clothing in the middle of the story, and I feel like the way we clothe ourselves really displays to the outside world who we are, and the act of putting on something new is quite a significant moment. You only ever do it once with a new piece of clothing, there’s only one first time, and because hers has been sort of postponed for the reasons of this loss, it felt like the new coat is actually a statement of her intent of stepping out and away from the person that she has been while grieving, and into something new. 

That’s a great answer.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I think it is, I think that’s what it is. It’s symbolic, symbols are a powerful thing, aren’t they? 

I think it makes sense, I think that’s a beautiful answer. The new coat is such an interesting meditation on a moment, the whole story takes place over just a few minutes while the main character is getting ready for the day, but of course, it’s about so much more. How did you choose the morning routine to focus on? 

I had this person in mind, and I had been reading a lot, and a few of my other stories concerned the position of…cause I come from a long line of amazing women, I just happen to not be a woman, I have sisters as well and they’re incredible. But a lot of Irish history, recent history in the last hundred years, has been quite fucked up by the Catholic church. So one of my other stories is about a woman in the 1930s who’s dealing with the raw reality of being a woman in Ireland in the 1930s, and basically having nothing and no access to anything. There was going to be a woman character in this story, and I was thinking about something that shifts that was outside off her agency, like the weather, and then it began to snow. Whats the moment then when you (the character) first notice it? When I work with kids in schools – have you heard of the grizzly bear test? 

No.

This is great to use in schools. If you’re working with kids and you're having them throw a story together, they’ll always have too many characters, they’ll have a ton of characters. If you need to narrow it down, what you do is put all your characters in a room, and they’re all sitting around eating pizza and playing XBOX and picking their nose or whatever. There’s a knock on the door, and one of them gets up to answer, and when they open the door, there’s a bear. The bear is standing on his two hind legs, and he’s covered in honey and there’s bees and wasps and flies around, and he opens his mouth and growls, and how your characters react then tells you something about each character. You need to make sure every character has a different reaction. If two characters have the same reaction, you need to get rid of one of those characters. You might be able to bring them back later if you find a good reason, but if everyone is reacting the same way, you have too many people.

So I was trying to figure out what kind of person she was by her reaction to the snow, and then as she got curious about it, that made me wonder “why is she now curious about it, and what would be the thing that makes snow so significant for her?” It’s universally wonderful, there’s so much wonder in snow, and then trying to imagine her aloneness, what would the counterpoint of that be? The counterpoint would be that there was someone in her life who didn’t like this thing…

(it wouldn’t be a Zoom interview if cats didn’t make an appearance and derail things for a moment, much love to those cats)

It sort of developed from there. The box comes into it. A few years ago there was a situation where I was sharing a home with somebody and we were no longer compatible, the relationship had completed, but there were all of these physical reminders, kind of awkward objects. The most awkward object is the rogue cardboard box with things in it that you can't throw away but you also don’t want to keep. Does that answer the question?

I think so!

I wanted to be inside this quiet person at a quiet moment that contains a lot of significance. I like looking closely at short periods of time. Most of the stuff I write takes place over a couple of hours or less. 

The story focuses on one character, a woman, as she gets ready and thinks about someone she's lost. Why did you choose not to name your characters, and how do you think that effects the story?  

(Laughter) I’m really bad at naming characters. 

(Laughter)

I’ve got a novel out on submission that’s 70,000 words and none of the characters have names. It’s infuriating, but luckily there’s only about five characters. An agent was like “what are you doing?” 

I wanted it to be as universal as possible, I wanted ten minutes of reading, if you’re in this solo pursuit of reading a short story, cause most of the time they’re not read out loud. I want to get back to that sense that you have when you’re like nine and you’re solo reading, that’s your kind of prime solo reading time, after nine things start to shift. You’ve got the vocab, you kind of understand metaphor, at least you can understand the implications a bit. You’re in someone else’s skin in this story, and as a child it’s usually like you’re on an adventure or there’s some kind of chaos and catastrophe and the main character is going to solve it. But, I think because I’ve been through that extended period of a relationship coming to a conclusion but taking a long time to end, that sense of being stuck in time for so long that the release isn’t sudden, the release is something that happens but it’s not like you wake up one day and everything’s fine.

This is a weird example, but if you’ve ever broken a bone, sometimes when the bone heals you can feel the moment of healing, and I wanted to try and capture that. That precise time, that few minutes where it shifted from the completion of grief, and stepping away into something else. And that’s why all the story happens in the flat, we never see her outside in the snow. We don’t know where she goes, what she does, she imagines what she might do but we don’t actually see her do any of it. 

Right.

She might’ve left the box down by the bins and just gone back upstairs and put the T.V. on. I don’t know, changed her mind. Yeah, small moment examination. 

You just mentioned that kind of childhood moment, which does lead me to my last question. The protagonist repeatedly returns to images of children playing in the snow, often folding these moments into reflections on her own childhood. What does childhood represent for you in this story, and why did you feel essential to foreground it so prominently? 

Reading it back today, I don’t think I consciously foregrounded it. But there’s a moment when she’s in the bathroom, and she can hear the kids more loudly, and when I first wrote it I thought it’s because the window is open in the bathroom. But I think it’s her imagining the sounds of her family from when she was younger. Snow is a family thing. I write it as well with the people who have got more time to smile and all that. The wonder was concentrated in childhood, and I think that sort of ties into this expression of incompatibility with the partner or father or child. Just knowing that she’s a different person to them because she can’t understand that they don’t like this wondrous thing. Maybe I was amplifying the wonder by connecting it to that kind of joyous reaction that children have to snow, especially when they see it for the first time. Maybe that’s it. Amplification of the wonder to heighten the kind of contrast of the missing man… just to really kind of say that their point of view is quite at odds with hers, and maybe they were never compatible at all, whoever he was. Maybe. That’s a hard one. I mean it’s shocking, unless you live in a snowy country, but if you live in the fringes of northwestern Europe, you get snow like every two years. It’s fascinating.