It must be incredibly strange to be one of the most famous people in Ireland, but nobody actually knows what you look like. This is the case for Blindboy Boatclub, the rapper-turned-writer-turned-podcaster, who first shot to fame in his native country in 2010 when his song Horse Outside became a viral hit. Along with his creative partner, Mr. Chrome, the two are known as The Rubberbandits and are permanent fixtures of the Irish art and music scene, even representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

Most notably, the duo wear plastic bags on their heads and have never officially revealed their identities. Something they both put down to simply just wanting to separate their public and private lives. Since 2017, Blindboy has produced The Blindboy Podcast, a hugely popular podcast that has introduced him to an international audience of over a million listeners a month. Adding to his multi-hyphenate career, Blindboy is also the author of three short story collections — The Gospel According to Blindboy, Boulevard Wren and Other Stories, and now Topographia Hibernica. His fiction is a strange mix of Irish mythology, complete absurdism, and utterly unique observations.

In anticipation of the release of Topographia Hibernica, we caught up with Blindboy to discuss the background of his new collection, his unique approach to writing and, naturally, James Joyce.

Barry Pierce: You draw on a sense of the absurd in your stories and you write in a very distinctly Irish voice, why is that?
Blindboy Boatclub: This is a bit of a mad take, but I often think that Hiberno-English [the dialect of English spoken in Ireland] is like our jazz music. It’s a post-colonial way of relating to language. You can be mad flexible with Hiberno-English. When I’m writing in Hiberno-English I’m not thinking about what’s right or wrong, I think about what feels right and that’s a very powerful thing for creativity. I feel comfortable making something up as I go along if it just feels right.  The parallel to that is African-American musical traditions, this idea of “I don’t care if this is right or wrong, because right or wrong don’t exist. What I’m doing here is looking for feeling.”I sent my first drafts over to my English publisher, and then the notes came back, and I’m having to defend my stuff, I don’t give a shit whether this is right or wrong. This is what I want to say. This is how a person in Limerick would say this.

“When I’m writing in Hiberno-English I’m not thinking about what’s right or wrong, I think about what feels right”

BP: I’ve always found your stories make perfect sense to me, but then again I am Irish so I suppose it’s just reading how I talk. But when I do read your stuff, I’m left wondering why not many other Irish writers write their books in Hiberno-English?
BB: It will limit you. I mean, someone who is quite unapologetic with it is Kevin Barry, he has real fun with Hiberno-English. Sally Rooney at the odd time would have a crack at it too, you’d know it’s an Irish writer but she doesn’t go hell for leather with it. To bring music into it, right now in the Irish music scene there are a lot of artists who are comfortable embracing Irishness and their Irish accents. You have Kojaque who’s doing really well internationally, Fontaines DC are singing in their Dublin accents, you have Lankum, and you have The Mary Wallopers. I saw this emerge because my background is in music. When I started with The Rubberbandits in the early 2000s, we were rapping in our Limerick accents, and it was strange then because it was kinda cringy to be an Irish rapper. No Irish artist at the time would dare sing in an Irish accent.

BP: It’s funny because perhaps the most famous Irish novel ever, Joyce’s Ulysses, is written in an incredibly Irish voice.
BB: You don’t see it as much anymore but throughout the 20th century, you would have had groups of Americans meeting up in universities to dissect Ulysses. They could spend six years in a group just dealing with Ulysses and taking it page by page. Ulysses is a dense book, but sometimes I wonder, how much of this is just figuring out how people talk in Ireland? I love Ulysses. I know that Ulysses is a dense book but I have no problem with it. I crack it open on any page, I read it and it sounds like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

BP: I have much the same relationship with Ulysses. It has this reputation for being one of the most difficult novels in the English language, but it all just absolutely flows for me. I think it truly only works if you are an Irish person and you understand the way Joyce has written it. I’ve read it a couple of times and it is, hands-down, the funniest book ever.
BB: Exactly, Ulysses is not impenetrable to me. I can make it impenetrable if I want but I can fucking read that.

“When I wrote my first book of short stories, I was like, fuck it. I can have Éamon de Valera turn into a giant, weird, globule, maggot creature that’s given birth to Michael Collins’ children because he’s got Holy Mary’s womb in his bowels”

BP: Tell me a bit about your writing process.
BB: When I was writing my first collection, I’d come from years of writing for television. When you’re writing for television, and this is the difficult thing about writing for television, you’re always thinking of money. If I’m writing something for TV and I decide my character is in an airport, then I have to think, are RTÉ going to be able to afford an airport? And then the amount of people in the scene, every single person in the scene is an extra that needs to get paid.

So when I wrote my first book of short stories, I was like, fuck it. I can have Éamon de Valera turn into a giant, weird, globule, maggot creature that’s given birth to Michael Collins’ children because he’s got Holy Mary’s womb in his bowels. I don’t have to think about whether RTÉ will let me or whether they can afford it, I can just fucking do it. So my first collection was very much ideas-focused. This recent collection is much more literary, I’m thinking more about the internal workings of the characters.

BP: We’ve talked before about how important the concept of flow is to your writing process.
BB: Flow is essential to my process. It’s a type of controlled dreaming. The thing with flow is it’s incredibly joyful and happy. We all get flow when we’re tiny kids and we’re playing with Lego. When a three-year-old is playing with Lego, they’re not thinking about, whether they’re going to make something good or make something bad. They’re simply doing Lego. If I sit down and decide I’m going to write a great story today, I won’t get anywhere near flow. For me to experience flow, I have to go at whatever I’m doing in a really playful, fun way and once I get to that place, everything comes through.

I used AI a bit this time too. If I had the first draft of a story, I’d fuck it into AI, and what I’d say is “analyse this story using the Hero’s Journey”, “analyse this story using Jungian psychology”, “analyse this story using…Lévi-Strauss!”And AI will give you a kind of dogshit interpretation of it but that dogshit interpretation it spits out can cause me to think about the work in a new critical way.

Topographia Hibernica by Blindboy Boatclub is out today from Coronet.