I’m not very good at guessing personality types, Andy. That’s not how counselling works. You seem a very nice boy, though. And that’s a professional judgement, by the way.’

Morris was facing another challenge, however. His debut’s success suggested a mastery of the short-story form, but he felt this masked that he had reached an impasse. “I felt at the end of the first collection I had reached the limits of my potential of the form.” He wasn’t his harshest critic, though. That was his mother.As an editor, Thomas has worked on stories and books by writers such as Colin Barrett, Nicole Flattery, Michael Magee, and Chetna Maroo. A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town’s summer festival… Just as all of the stories in his friend Colin Barrett’s award-winning debut collection, Young Skins, were set in Glenbeigh, a fictional and godforsaken town in the west of Ireland, so too is there a unity of place in Morris’s collection, all but one of which are set in his native Caerphilly, a sleepy castle town in south Wales. In Wales, in the short opening story, Gareth is taken by his father to an international friendly match. His parents have split up and the threat of the repo man hangs over his home, so the young boy makes cosmic bargains. If his dad doesn’t come in, Wales will win. If Wales win, the house won’t be repossessed. When I’m writing, I default to a kind of earnest realist first person that tries hard to be literary. At some point I get bored and start joking to myself: “Why not write about seahorses for a bit of relief from the Very Important Work over there?” And then the story on the left is the one that starts coming together – being caught by surprise seems to be the way for me to write. I’ve just done a story for radio from the point of view of a seagull, and one of the things I enjoy about that mode is that I can’t use my go-to small details like having someone scratch their chin or sigh during a conversation; I actually have to think, well, how does a seahorse hold its head?

Editor of The Stinging Fly, one of Ireland’s top literary magazines, Thomas Morris is no stranger to reading and writing short fiction. In the final countdown to the deadline for our short story competition we spoke to the writer and editor about his debut collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, heritage, habits and the art of disguise. Thomas’s stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published and anthologised in a number of venues, including Zoetrope, Granta, Best European Fiction, and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story ,edited by Philip Hensher. I've become a real good-line-underliner recently, but I borrowed this from someone, and was so overwhelmed by goodness and wanting to remember that I wrote everything I loved on my bookmark. I’ve heard you love Dylan Thomas’s short stories despite the fact they’re rarely talked about – which ones?A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting sexual encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town's summer festival. Set in Caerphilly, a diminished castle town in South Wales, Thomas Morris debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. By turns poignant, witty, tender and bizarre these entertaining stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don't know what they're doing. This is the work of a young writer with a startlingly fresh voice, an uncanny ear for dialogue and a broad emotional range Wales is a lot poorer than Ireland. It has internalised a learned helplessness after years of systematic neglect by Westminster. I’ve always felt a lot freer in Dublin. I’m literally a card-carrying supporter of Welsh independence. I remember a teacher presenting the British empire as something glorious, without using the word “colonising”. Coming to Ireland, the scales fell from my eyes, how different my life and my friends’ life would be if we lived in a country that wasn’t dependent and looked after its people.” I wrote a story when I was in TCD, submitted it to the college literary magazine, and it got published. When I went to the launch of that issue of the magazine, I was quite shy and nervous, and was told that no one wanted to run the Literary Society, and then asked would I be interested. I said that I didn’t want to, but that I’d help make posters.

Heart-hurtingly acute, laugh-out-loud funny, and not just a book of the year for me but one of the most satisfying collections I've read for years." (Ali Smith, Guardian Books of the Year) Thomas Morris’s debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing(Faber & Faber, 2015) was chosen as a Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Observer, The Spectator, The Irish Times, and The Irish Independent.

But appearances can be deceptive. He may have been a literary aristocrat, but he was also a member of the precariat, without a home, never mind a room, of his own. The average author does not earn much, but the short-story writer is usually the poor relation. Authors have a choice to make when pulling a collection of short stories together on how to make it hang together – do they share a common setting or characters, or are they individual pieces? Thomas Morris has chosen to set nine of the ten stories in his debut collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, in the Welsh town of Caerphilly. The psychiatrist spends the early part of the story pretending to be a horse, raising the prospect of a Twin Peaks-esque town of eccentrics that is sadly only followed through with a couple of later characters: a woman that only has sex whilst wearing masks of famous actors, a boy overcoming teenage rejection wrestling older women in the castle grounds. The rest of the characters in the book are all thoroughly grounded in reality and their own misery.

One of the other particularly impressive pieces here is ‘All the Boys’. This, the aforementioned stag weekend story, initially gave this critic some misgivings, as it appeared to be heading into Inbetweeners territory once more. However, this is far from the case, as Morris expertly fuses something terribly sad and poignant out of all the laddish humour and bravado (which is, at the same time, rendered in such a way as to often be laugh-out-loud hilarious). It calls to mind Frank O’Connor’s ‘In The Train’, in this sense, with its microscopic awareness of the grit and minutiae of the moment combined with its inherent transience. The story leaves the reader with a sense of the great sweep of time as it departs like a locomotive from a station with a plangent cry. It is also worth noting that Morris writes wonderfully well about the Dublin that he now calls home in this piece, an avenue which it is to be hoped he explores in more detail in the future. The power of great literature lies in its ability to reflect society. Writing about John McGahern, the American author John Updike called it “that tonic gift, the sense of truth – the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own”. I read two great debut short story collections last year – Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin, which was last month’s Irish Times Book Club choice; and We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris, which is this month’s Irish Times Book Club choice.Morris was born in Caerphilly, Wales, and left there for Dublin about ten years ago to study English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.