Q&A with Brigid Swanick

Featured writer Brigid Swanick was able to talk with one of our fiction editors, Rachel Walshe, this week about her piece ‘The Man With Elastic Shoelaces,’ which is also available on our website now. The following interview has been slightly edited for conciseness and clarity.

Rachel Walshe: To start off, this story felt like such a great character study, where did the idea come from? Is it based on someone you know with elasticated shoelaces? 

Brigid Swanick: One day I was looking to replace my shoelaces, and I stumbled across “elastic shoelaces.” I had never heard of such a thing. I thought: my life will be radically different once I no longer have to tie my shoes. The mere amusement from this nifty trick will sustain me for months and uplift my spirits beyond what anybody would guess is reasonable.

Now most of my shoes have elastic laces. Nobody seems sufficiently astounded when I show them. But it is fair to say I may have a higher than usual tendency to be amazed and astounded by stuff nobody cares about.

RW: I may need to look into these! So our narrator is genuine in his chatting to strangers about their shoelaces? They're really a good Samaritan. I found the piece had such a fun, comedic register. Is that usual of your work as a whole?

BS: This type of humor always tends find its way into my writing, to some degree. The narrator thinks he's very clever. He's got this convoluted scheme to talk to strangers and admits its because he is lonely. Its the closest approximation of friendship it even occurs to him to attempt - the kind where he's more likely to be remembered if he runs away before they even know his name. It doesn't occur to him that real friendship is even within reach, or that he might be likeable without his props. He means to be funny, but he's longing for more connection than elastic shoelaces will get him.

RW: Yeah, there that longing you mentioned is really moving, and I think one of the reasons I felt for the character so much because that push and pull of wanting connection but maybe being afraid of the reality of that is something I think a lot of people experience. It made me feel a bit for all the men fake-reading Borges in pubs. Is that empathy for the ridiculous important for you as a writer, or what motivates you to go to the page? Was the spark of the shoelaces novelty enough to get you going? I guess this is a long way of asking did you find the character with the story, or did you go in with a narrative you wanted to tell? 

BS: None of the characters I’ve ever written are that different from me, but at the same time I am enough like other people for that to be enough. I think what motivates me to go to the page is that a lot of a normally lived life is incredibly alienating, but I noticed very early that I could find points of re-connection in unexpected places, and an entire world I didn’t belong to could become home again in just a few sentences.

I started making that logic happen in my life and conveying it to other people during the part of my life I wanted to be a writer but hadn’t made explicit what I wanted to say. Essentially my aim as a writer is to do this, say “I am like you, and you are like me” and I just like to write from the perspective of somebody a few degrees more lost than I currently feel. But it’s worth reiterating that I have elastic shoelaces and point them out to people. It’s just through details like this that I’m often telling the same kinds of stories, in a way that reminds you of things you already know.