Hype can be a double-edged sword. Thirteen years ago, Dave Tynan’s short film Just Saying had made him a name to watch in the arts.
A gritty reflection on emigration and what it means to be Irish, the video featuring actor Emmet Kirwan walking through the streets of Dublin became a viral hit, drawing more than half a million views.
Its closing lines ran: “There’s ten good reasons to go but a thousand tiny ones not to, and I don’t know which is which any more.”
Tynan’s feature-length 2018 film debut, Dublin Oldschool, telling of warring siblings and hedonistic partygoers, built on the impression that the Dubliner was delivering a new, edgy side to Irish storytelling. A bright future for the young writer-director seemed inevitable.
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Then came silence. Or as Tynan (39) puts it with an abashed grin: “This is my first face-to-face interview in seven years.” He lets out a breath. Boy is he glad to be here, in this city centre Dublin hotel with his debut collection of short stories on the table, due to be published by revered British publishing house Granta.
The last few years have been a slog. “It’s isolating writing a book,” Tynan says. “It’s good to get out of the house. When you’re not doing press, when you’re not on set, that’s when you’re in the trenches. While writing it, I wasn’t making any money.” He lets out a bark of laughter. “Your 30s isn’t a great time for things not to work.”
Tynan has regrets about aspects of Dublin Oldschool and his lack of experience at that time. He had a degree from the National Film School at Institute of Art, Design and Technology. He had worked on acclaimed shorts, including the Ifta-winning Rockmount, inspired by the early life of Roy Keane, and the Repeal Project video We Face this Land, which reflected on Irish women’s journeys to access abortion, based on a poem by Sarah Maria Griffin. “I’m very proud of a lot of the short films,” he says. “They’re made with love and detail.”
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But Tynan wasn’t necessarily business-savvy. “I shot Oldschool in 2017,” he says. “It was an ugly process. I didn’t have an agent or a manager. It’s not my cut. I’ve learned a lot. There were things in the reviews that I was like, ‘Well, I agree with that’. So that was really tough.”
Tynan has qualms too about the quick-fire methods through which he and Kirwan distributed their two most successful shorts, Just Saying and Heartbreak, which followed in 2017.
“We made work that didn’t depend on gatekeepers,” he says. “It wasn’t like we were plucked out at a festival and given an award. We put videos up online. Maybe that’s not for everyone.” Tynan might have been in the film-making industry, but the impression he gives is that he didn’t necessarily feel part of it.
What sustained Tynan in the fallow years was fiction-writing. From his parents’ basement in Dublin 8, he kept going, churning out screenplays and experimenting with short fiction. In 2016, his first short story, a sharp take on Irish weddings entitled How Do You Know Them? was published in The Stinging Fly magazine.
“It was the first short story I’d ever written, and then I thought, ‘Oh, I can write short stories,’ and then I didn’t get anything else published for years,” he laughs. It didn’t deter him. He took a six-month Stinging Fly writing course. He got another story, Off Your Chest, published in the Winter Papers anthology in 2020.
“There are no shortcuts on craft,” he says. “It takes as long as it takes.”
He would print off hard copies of his stories and scrutinise them, pen in hand. “It’s not a romantic idea, but you get there by going over it again and again.”
We Used to Dance Here is full of Dublin-based characters seething with anger. Poverty stalks them. Humdrum jobs inhibit them. They’re wondering if this is all there is. There’s Róisín, whose phone keeps auto-correcting her name to “prison”, who is being kicked out of her house by her landlord. There’s Conor, who is getting dumped by his American girlfriend. There’s Ger, who loses his finger in an accident at work.
They try to find optimism, but circumstances make it hard. Róisín doesn’t know where to turn. “At home she boiled too much pasta and hid in her room. If she was given a quid every time she was told depression is like weather, she wouldn’t be stressed over the rent. It passes, they said, but she knew that, she grew up with Irish weather so she knew the rain is always coming back.”
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Dublin landmarks are scattered through the stories, from the swans in Portobello harbour to Pyg in South William Street to Phoenix Park. It’s a book to linger over, particularly if you know the city.
Tynan is inventive with language – a hot day is a “goth-tester of a summer’s day, sun buttering up the kitchen”. Every line is the product of a lot of work. “In a book I want someone to really be turning on the fireworks with language,” Tynan says. “You’re always trying to write what you don’t feel is out in the world already.”
Tynan’s stories would often start life in his notes app on his iPhone. Did friends learn to be wary of him potentially transcribing their sentences on his phone as they talked in pubs and coffee shops? “No,” he says. A smile crosses his face. “You can always go to the bathroom.”
Tynan’s look is low-key: clad in a black T-shirt, white shirt and trousers, he blends into his surroundings as surely as a potted plant. It seems intentional. “I’d like the work to be loud, but I don’t need to be loud,” he says.
An important facet of the book’s existence is the basic income for the arts pilot scheme, which began in 2022. A lottery-based scheme, Tynan is grateful to have made the cut. “It’s a game changer,” he says.
“Dublin is not a good city to be broke in. It’s mad that a small amount of money in this city, how much it changed people’s lives. You can’t live off it, you couldn’t pay rent off it, but it’s something and it’s regular. You know there’s something coming in. You don’t have to talk to a welfare officer. There’s a trust. You’re kind of left to your own devices.”
Tynan is not sure what will happen next for him in fiction after We Used to Dance Here is published. “I was approaching it like it might be the only book I ever write,” he says. Until now, he has never seriously considered writing a novel. “I really value the short story. That was like, ‘I can aim at that much.’ The idea of sitting down and writing 60,000 or 100,000 words would have scared me.”
In the future, he hopes to return to feature-length film projects. “There’s a lot of movies not made yet,” he says. “I haven’t stopped writing screenplays. Mark O’Halloran has been script-editing me. He asks good, tough questions. I think I’ll get back on set next year. I really miss it. That high-stakes make-believe, it’s a real buzz.”
But first there’s the book to launch and the interviews to be done. Tynan is happy and proud that his book is being published by Granta, and that he’s back in the world of the arts again. “After the wilderness years, this means so much to me.”
We Used to Dance Here is published by Granta
