by Elise Goitia '18

"Violently funny."

That's how Professor Robert McClure Smith describes The Violence, his recently published collection of fictional essays.

"For me, the two things kind of go together," says Smith, who is Knox's John and Elaine Fellowes Distinguished Chair in English. "We laugh at things that make us anxious. No one laughs harder at a joke they don't get. I'm intrigued by that. And violence is interesting in a transformative way. I try not to kill people, but give them transformative meanings."

The Violence, published by Queen's Ferry Press, plays with idealism and harsh realism through stories that ultimately culminate in violence. The stories, though unified through their intrinsic theme of brutality, surprise the reader with contrasting topics.

The collection, he says, had been a work in progress, with some of the pieces written as early as the 2000s and others written just last year.

The Violence was fundamentally inspired by the working-class communities McClure Smith grew up with in Scotland.

"I grew up in a council housing estate that was a violent place. And, so, I've always been interested in things like deprivation and how violence emerges from those kinds of situations."

To incorporate that idealism, he experimented with stories in order to find a balance between the raw nature of violence in difficult situations and occasional humor.

"Different interpretations of these sounds is really interesting to me," he added. "It's a way to escape from yourself."