"I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves"
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Welsh is staking a claim for where his voice comes from: not the library, the workshop, or the literary salon, but the mouth. The line draws a sharp class-and-medium distinction: “everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote.” Story doesn’t belong to credentialed culture; it belongs to whoever can hold a room. Writing, by contrast, is framed as an institution, a gate with keys that didn’t circulate in his environment. That tension is basically the origin story of his whole project: smuggling the energy of spoken life into a form that’s historically policed by spelling, grammar, and “proper” taste.
Calling it “Celtic” does two things at once. It romanticizes the tradition just enough to give it lineage, then undercuts any quaint postcard version by locating that same oral impulse in “clubs and raves.” Welsh collapses the hierarchy between the pub yarn and the dance-floor anecdote, suggesting continuity between folk tradition and late-20th-century youth culture. The subtext is that authenticity isn’t a museum piece; it mutates with the soundtrack.
There’s also a quiet defense of his infamous phonetic dialect and breakneck dialogue. If your world is built on voice, then the “correct” way to write is whatever most faithfully transmits cadence, humor, menace, and intimacy. Welsh isn’t merely reporting a background; he’s justifying an aesthetic: literature as overheard speech, with all the mess and music left intact.
Calling it “Celtic” does two things at once. It romanticizes the tradition just enough to give it lineage, then undercuts any quaint postcard version by locating that same oral impulse in “clubs and raves.” Welsh collapses the hierarchy between the pub yarn and the dance-floor anecdote, suggesting continuity between folk tradition and late-20th-century youth culture. The subtext is that authenticity isn’t a museum piece; it mutates with the soundtrack.
There’s also a quiet defense of his infamous phonetic dialect and breakneck dialogue. If your world is built on voice, then the “correct” way to write is whatever most faithfully transmits cadence, humor, menace, and intimacy. Welsh isn’t merely reporting a background; he’s justifying an aesthetic: literature as overheard speech, with all the mess and music left intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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