Category: Writer Interview

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 71: Brian Kirk on “Hare’s Breath” (Salmon Poetry: Galway, 2023)

Brian, Welcome back to Writers Chat. This time we’re talking about Hare’s Breath your latest collection published by Salmon (2023). It’s a collection that deserves to be read with care – as much care as you clearly put into the language in the poems and the shape of the collection – and one that rewards the reader with each re-read.

Cover of Hare’s Breath featuring a drawing of a hare (cover image artwork by Rosaleen Fleming)

SG: Let’s begin with the title poem, “Hare’s Breath”, which explores the process of living and that of creating. You wrote an early draft when you were resident in Cill Rialaig. It seems without that residency, that poem would not have been written – the landscape, literally, provided you with the theme, the images, and a way (back?) into your creative self. I’m thinking of the opening lines: “I came here to work/but needed to stop.” Could you tell us more about the writing of this poem?

BK: It’s so good to be invited back to Writers Chat, thanks, Shauna. Yes, the poem “Hare’s Breath” came relatively late to the collection and went on to provide the title, so it’s an important poem for me. I was in Cill Rialaig last February ostensibly to work on the first draft of a new novel. I was very much concerned with word count and making progress which is not always a good idea. I did do some work on other poems I was writing at the time while I was there too, but this poem came from my daily solitary walks up Bolus Head. I love walking and the landscape there is so beautiful and isolated. On one of my first walks, I encountered a hare and each day after that I would go looking for it, but only saw it again briefly on one occasion. The poem as you say is about creativity or inspiration – where art or writing comes from and how difficult it can be to grasp it and hold on to it in the world we live in now that is so full of distractions.  

SG: As with your previous collection, After The Fall, the main themes in Hare’s Breath are relationships – with family, friends, self, creativity – and time. But here it feels that you’re casting your internal eye back and focusing on the formation of a genetic line in time and place that time changes. I’m thinking of “Kingdom”

….we didn’t lick it off the ground…But we grew up and let him down…dreaming another kind of life outside the fortress that he built from duty, faith and love…His kingdom didn’t last. No kingdom does.

This is also seen in the pairing of “Belturbet Under Frost” and “Googling My Parents” which are beautiful love songs to the past. There’s an emotional weight in these poems which draws the reader back again to re-read. Could you comment on these poems?

BK: I think the past will always be a repository of ideas for me. In After The Fall I had some poems about my parents, but I think I approached them in an oblique way. In “Leave-taking” the picture of a dying father are mediated through the memories of an older brother while I was away living in London. In “The Kitchen in Winter” my mother is conjured from the memory of repeated winter mornings in the place where she held sway. In Hare’s Breath there is more of a sense of celebration of their lives I hope, certainly in the sonnet ‘Belturbet Under Frost’ which re-imagines the beginnings of their love. In poems like “Kingdom” and “Windfall” my father is portrayed as a man of his time, struggling at times in the face of a world that is changing. In some ways he is the child and his children the adults. In “Googling My Parents” I suppose I was trying and failing to reclaim my parents. They both died in the late 1980s within six months of each other while I was living in London, and there’s always a sense of things left unsaid. The closing lines of the poem came to me slowly over time. I was trying to say something, I think, about memory and the human mind, its power and its shortcomings. I was trying to liken the brain/mind to a machine (not a very original simile I know) but that wasn’t enough. I was thinking about that story in the Gospel about the Transfiguration. Peter was bumbling around talking about building tents on the mountain when a cloud appeared and a voice spoke out of it to them. I knew then that that was what I was looking for. My parents speaking to me from the cloud (even if only in dreams). It seemed apt as, after all, everything is stored in the cloud nowadays.

SG: A poignant observation indeed. “My First Infatuation”, “Sour” and “Bully” examine early love and hurt through the eyes of a knowing adult. I’m curious about both the positioning of these poems in the collection and the process of writing them – did they come (almost) fully formed, or did you need to tease them out as part of a reckoning with the past in order to move foreword?

BK: When I’m writing poems I’m not thinking in terms of a collection or where each one might appear in a collection, but when I got to the stage where I sensed I had enough good work to look at putting a book together certain poems grouped themselves. In the case of the poems “My First Infatuation”, “Sour” and “Hydra” I do remember these being written around the same time. They are of a piece in terms of style and subject matter, poems about adolescence, I suppose, being considered from a later vantage point. When I was putting the collection together, I realized that “Bully” sat well in there too and also “Sundays in June” and the most recent poem I wrote for the collection “That Last Summer”. I was concerned I think with re-visiting earlier versions of myself – some of whom I didn’t altogether recognise at first. While writing of these poems, each emerged quite quickly and were then subsequently revised, mainly in terms of the sounds. I think sound is very important in my poems and how they read aloud is key for me when revising.

SG: I can see that, alright. There were a number of your poems that I read aloud to compare the experience of reading them in my mind. I enjoyed the back-and-forth glances between past and possible futures or futures that will now never be – in “Exile”, “Dog Days”, “Multiverse”, and in “Excursion into Philosophy” where you end with that wonderful question “Are beginnings and endings the same?” There is a solid sense of regret but alongside this there is a sharp sense of hope, like you’ve focused a lens in on it. Did you find solace and clarity in writing these poems?

BK: I’m glad you’ve alluded to the future in these poems. I wouldn’t want readers to think that I’m merely obsessed by the past (but yes, I do go back a lot to work things out for myself in the now). The collection is dedicated to my kids and to the future and the book, as it progresses, opens out I hope into a meditation on how the past feeds into the future in a cyclical fashion. I think everyone harbours pain from past experience, but what is really amazing is how, every day, people, even in the most extreme straits, manage to get up again and keep going on. I tend to agree with Joan Didion in that I write to find out what I really think, so there is always a sense of discovery.

SG: Yes, a sense of discovery and a hope that opens up. Hare’s Breath also spans outwards from your life exploring other journeys, the luck of survivors – in, for example, “Hibakusha”, “The Last Days of Pompeii”, “Train Dreams”, “Small Things” – and our impact on nature – in “Houses,” “Seaside Fools” and with that punch of a line in “Gaia”:

We’re dust, and nature doesn’t give a fuck

about our self-importance or regrets:

one day our books will float away in streams

Our own concerns fade into nothing in the bigger picture you paint, and yet, you show us how we – and all that we do, and those that we love – are so fragile and that is what really matters. That acknowledgement of vulnerability and with that a lightness, like in the final poem in the collection, “The Invisible House”, where you end with laughter. Is that the cure for us all?

BK: I think living is a constant coming to terms with things. Community, family, friendships are the things that make it possible for us to continue to live. (I think Covid reminded us of that also. There are some Covid poems in here which seem to fit). In the later stages of the collection the poems begin to look outward more, away from the subjective experience to a broader sphere, taking on social, political and ecological subjects. I’m convinced that being able to laugh at ourselves is one of the most important and one the hardest things to do in life. I hope there are moments of humour in the collection too, in poems like “Seaside Fools”, “The Workshop”, “The Last Days of Pompeii” and “Out of Time.” I’d like to think people will smile from time to time as they read.

SG: We will end with a few light questions:

  • Most surprising poem from Hare’s Breath? I think perhaps “The Last Days of Pompeii” because it is the most overtly political poem in the collection. It came in a rush as a kind of ‘state of the world’ poem and on reflection I think I was channelling the late Kevin Higgins who was a great mentor to many poets and had such a wickedly humorous way of making a political point in a poem.
  • It has that sense of humour and the punch of politics, like in much of Kevin’s work alright. Coffee or Tea? It has to be tea. I do enjoy an occasional coffee but limit myself to no more than one a day.
  • Sea or Mountains? I grew up by the sea in Rush, so it has to be the sea. But I love all things rural even though I’ve spent nearly all my life living in cites or suburbs.
  • Do you have a go-to book that you frequently re-read? Yeats’ poetry and lately Derek Mahon’s collected. I do have a look at Ulysses also every few years and I tend to re-read a lot of favourite short stories.
  • Quite a wide variety of go-to genres there! Any literary events coming up for you? I’ll be reading at ‘The Listeners’ at The Revels. Main Street, Rathfarnham Village on Tuesday 6th February 2024. After that I’m hoping to get to readings and festivals around the country during the year as much as possible.

Best of luck with the readings and festivals and I wish you much continued success with the collection. Hare’s Breath may be purchased from Salmon Poetry.

Photo of Brian Kirk in a blue shirt in front of shrubbery, courtesy of Brian Kirk.
Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 70: Adrie Kusserow on “The Trauma Mantras” (Duke University Press: March 2024)

Adrie, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press: 2024) which, in the words of Yusef Komunyakaa, “is a gift across cultures…each poetic essay is a deep voyage”.

SG: Let’s start with what is possibly the most appropriate title for a collection of standalone yet connected narratives, The Trauma Mantras. In the process of creating this book, when did you arrive at the title and why did you structure the book, in three acts?

AK:I arrived at the title very late in the game, I was originally going to call it The Trouble with Trauma, to get at the anthropological critique of Western conceptions of Trauma, but then I had a class at the college where I teach and I received three emails from students saying they found a certain article traumatizing and it just occurred to me that for some of these students, trauma has become a mantra, something they think will actually help them by invoking it over and over again, like a mantra. I liked the sound of The Trauma Mantras, and I proposed putting it all as one word The Traumamantras, but my publisher felt that would be too confusing. I love that mama is in the middle of it and I like the way it hints at the Western Psychologization of certain Buddhist concepts like mantra.  I decided to break it up into three sections to give the reader a bit of breathing space, the first section deals a lot more with Trauma per se, but I’m not sure I could categorize the other section into any kind of theme.  You asked about three sections, but I’ve divided the book into two.

SG: The Trauma Mantras is unlike any collection I’ve read. Reading it was like a spell which evoked such a strong sense of place and senses that I felt compelled to go right to the start and read it again. How important is place in how you experience the world – as an anthropologist, writer and woman.

AK: Place is everything and isn’t separate from the self. As an anthropologist, we learn and teach that place and culture is not some kind of superficial covering of the mind/body, it permeates our every cell. It inhabits the senses consciously and unconsciously. I never understood journals that say they feature writing about place, because all writing on some level is about place even if it is never mentioned or described, because place is absorbed and informing the subjects we write about all the time. I can’t imagine not including place in my writing because I’m so intensely aware of the power of place to shape self. Early on as an anthropologist and a woman, I was struck by how the places I could go were limited and how my being a white woman caused people to perceive me in certain ways I wasn’t used to. In parts of South Sudan I couldn’t just walk around at night by myself and traveling alone in certain parts of India I’ve also felt unsafe at times. I’m also keenly aware of the places I cannot enter as an anthropologist because I am female. For example my husband used to have long meetings with Sudan People’s Liberation Army leaders, all male, while I hung out with the women in the kitchen. In cultures where gender segregation is more the norm, I was acutely aware that I would only be able to explore female dominated places.

SG:  The Trauma Mantras is disturbingly timely in its subject matter and dedication (to refugees everywhere). Many of the narratives touch on the notion of fixing things, systems, people and westerners are often portrayed as unwanted invaders. Right at the outset, we meet Smriti who declares that “you can make yourself so very small if you try…” and there’s the question that hangs in the air throughout the book “who knows if telling her story actually helped like our NGO told her it would”. There are multiple narratives about telling stories and getting everything out that your questioning of this practice in relation to trauma – creating and re-creating trauma like a mantra – is really powerful. Can you talk about this?

AK: Yes, in the West we have a very Freudian hydraulic metaphor for mental health and emotions, that things need to be expressed in order to get better, especially through talk therapy and revisiting the trauma story and telling it over and over. Many non Western cultures don’t have this same ethnopsychology, and we can’t just presume that our Western psychology is a universal truth. It is one among many ways of thinking about wellbeing. Tibetan refugees and Tibetan Buddhism has a very different conception of trauma which has helped them become one of the most resilient refugee populations. They do not believe in endless processing and foraging around the depths of negative emotions, rather they learn to let them go through lojong exercises, see them from a more spacious and wider perspective, identify them with the wider universal truth of suffering, reframe them as positive ways of paying off karmic debt. The degree to which the trauma concept has been globalized is frightening to me because it is replacing very healthy, often sociomythic and spiritual responses to suffering and disasters that have taken centuries to develop and work. The globalization of the trauma narrative is also contributing to a view of the self as fragile, delicate, easily triggered instead of resilient and hardy. Social workers for trauma therapy are often the first thing we send over to “rescue” countries recovering from war or disaster, even before issues like food, housing, family reunification, school are put back in place. The problem with seeing everything through the trauma lens, is that so much healthy, practical, pragmatic desires (I want to be with my friends, go back to school) is viewed as a kind of repression of what must come out. The assumption that grief and trauma must eventually “rise up” is not necessarily true and has been challenged.  This view of emotions and feelings also puts them squarely inside the individual, instead of in the social body.

SG: Following on from this, I found it fascinating how we read about the college students with their “triggers everywhere” alongside traumatised refugees who often wonder why they are being asked to speak of their experiences. In Getting the story just right we’re told

What withers in America are the clumsy folksy smelly stories that smack of soul, spirit, ancestors, cows, witches, tribe, too much history

Essentially, these are the real stories (or so it seems to me), but not necessarily seen or told through the lens of trauma. Your anger and frustration are palpable “I resent how the doctors gave her a story because they couldn’t tolerate no story at all”. Do you think our lives have been narrativized so much that they are now narrow to the extent that the felt experience cannot be felt?

AK: Yes I do think our lives have been narrativized, conditioned and trained to wind around the concept of psychologized individualism. There was an article in the New Yorker called The Case Against the Trauma Plot by Parul Seghal which consider how the trauma plot is dominating fiction. When this kind of narrative becomes hegemonic and the only narrative in town really used, people tend to gravitate toward it for lack of any other kinds of narratives to use which are widely accepted. People want to connect with each other, so they move into narratives that are currently in vogue to communicate as they are chatting by the water cooler. There are so many different (wider) ways to tell a story without invoking a hardy individualized heroic self that perseveres by exploring his/her psychological depths.  What about stories that center around myth, dreams, history, ancestors, politics, environment?

SG: Talk to me about academia and the difficulty in being open to the truths of our imperialist and polarised world view alongside the pressure of not offending or triggering – it strikes me that this book is a way in which to express what cannot be said in our institutions, in contrast to cultural rituals around grief and so on (e.g. wakes) which do let the horror out. In This is What Sorrow Looks like it feels that the deep It also pitches the disciplines of anthropology against that of psychology. Could you comment on these observations?

AK: Yes, I have had to be careful at my own institution and within academia – if trauma becomes the mental illness we have fallen in love with, then to suggest alternative conceptions of reality and different modes of healing is often seen as not being compassionate to the traumas people are suffering, including the students. My goal is not to deny the very real and painful student suffering, but to suggest alternative, less psychologized ways of making sense/meaning out of it. My Anthropology of Mental Health class is very much a critique of certain assumptions of Western psychology.

I’m also a big believer in the power of creative writing and artistic mediums to convey the complexities, subtleties and sensualities of cultural concepts. Art and academic belong together. I feel I’m much more able to represent and explore the deeply felt embodied emotions and  cultural nuances that are sometimes not portrayed in more stiff academic articles. Ethnographic poetry and fiction used to be quite rare, but more and more anthropologists are weaving creative writing into their ethnographies. In grad school I never would have been able to attempt writing up my field notes in poetic form because it wasn’t seen as scholarly and objective. I had to wait until I’d published a book and received tenure before I could “come out” as an ethnographic poet, but now this kind of writing is much more accepted.

 I’m very aware of how annoying I must sound constantly critiquing individualism in a culture where Individualism is a God, a King in this culture, and so deeply embedded in our view of the “natural” order of things.  Sometimes students find this critique liberating, sometimes threatening. I tell them over and over, we do not have to frame the challenges of an era as internal problems with individual solutions.  I do think that rather than triggering, sometimes they find the cross cultural truths I expose them to refreshing and freeing.  

Also, for example, so many colleges have vast resources built up around individualized counseling and psychotherapy to deal with post covid student depression and anxiety and mental health days are becoming quite common for students to declare they are taking. My question is what should constitute a mental health day? Should we be promoting curling up in bed in our dorm rooms and watching Netflix? Perhaps we need to broaden what constitutes healing to include group trips into the woods, iphone fasting, tree planting, visiting the homes of New Americans, taking the bus and chatting with someone you don’t know who seems very different from you, getting out of your comfort zone. Perhaps we need to up the narratives around student resilience and use more metaphors of strength and grit around student mental health. Let’s help students explore what constitutes nurturing the self outside of the psychologized individualism narrative? As well as encouraging places of consciousness that don’t privilege thought like yoga and meditation?

SG: You combine visceral, sensory and quite beautiful writing with hard facts and, what feel like hard truths about the impact of your field work on family, psyche and, as we’ve noted before, that question about making change for good. In Calla Lily, Condom, we read how your son, at the bus station in Uganda

could hardly see the difference between the squashed condom the man threw at her in disgust and the crushed lily flattened by the muzungu’s high heel, between the bleeding, the bleeding from everywhere there was an opening, and the languid arch of the red hibiscus sprawled against the night.

It struck me that the child has not yet learned or been taught to label the world in terms of trauma, triggers, and feeling. Do you think society trains us to articulate our lives in a very particular narrative frame?

AK: Yes, culture very much trains us to articulate our lives in a very particular narrative frame. In Calla Lilly, Condom, I remember wishing I could view the world through my son’s three year old perspective which was less socialized than my own responses. I felt so overwhelmed by the raw suffering I saw at this bus station that I wondered how much of this reality he also experienced as brutal to watch and how much he simply saw this reality without the tragic lens I could not escape.

SG: In The Trauma Mantras you show how even when giving birth, we search for meaning and ways of expressing how we feel rather than just allowing ourselves to feel “we string tired word stitched to tired word between us…a dogged, clumsy kind of loving, weaving our coarse nets between us, pulling each other ashore.” Later, you “simultaneously think and question whether every mother is nothing less than the sky the child plays under, giving them a shelter from the infinite.” I thought this was possibly the most beautiful statement about the power and pressure of motherhood in twenty-first century western society. This is, of course, a moving thread throughout the book – the author’s motherhood against Ayeri’s motherhood and the themes of trauma and death. Was this an intentional theme or one which emerged as you pulled the collection together? Could you comment on this?

AK: I think motherhood was woven into the book because it is an essential aspect of who I am as a human on this planet. To leave it out would have been like hiding my full self from the reader. Because I am a woman and a mother, I was given access to other women and mothers in other cultures. This was a real gift.  Because I was so deeply committed to being a mother, I found that I couldn’t bear to leave my children at home some of the time. This both limited the circles I could explore (there are some places I simply couldn’t take my children) as well as opened up others I wouldn’t have access to as a  woman without children.  Mothers were drawn to me as I was to them, and so they became a more prominent part of my field work, so I think it is inevitable that the theme of motherhood is woven throughout this book. In anthropology it is easier to establish rapport with people who share a basic universal similarity, like children. So I ended up talking more with mothers than with fathers or single men, for example, and then reflecting on the cross cultural similarities and differences between us.

SG: Many of the narratives are created from observations, themselves beautiful poems to life and our world. In Part 2, Tulip Fever the simple act of planting tulips during a pandemic becomes a ritual and a way to affirm life:

May 15 Burning Hearts. Queens of the Night, lipstick streaked, thighs splayed open ….May 18 Giant red Darwins, shiny clawed lobsters, underbellies bulging and blue veined

And later we are reminded that “though we think our minds are sealed with skulls, the hair on our arms is the first to sense an oncoming storm.” These gave me hope – that though we have possibly psychologised our way out of ourselves, our body still knows.

AK: I think that the Buddhist in me is often trying to get back to the places beneath thought, of pure knowing without the psychological grids, values, labels. Meditation and yoga have been crucial to this process as I tend to be a fairly obsessive thinker and analyzer. Anytime I can slip into the somatic experience without the busy neurotic nest of the mind replaying its dramas is very healing for me. Meditation has shown me how much of reality is spliced and diced into good/bad, aversion/attraction, should/shouldn’t and other dichotomies that corral us into a kind of limited grooves of experience. What happens when we let these go? When we try and experience, for example, a feeling in the body not just as fear, but as a particular fascinating sensation? What happens when we let go of all the ego based stories that we are so profoundly hooked on?  What are we missing out on by locking so much of our perception in the constant chatter of the mind? I come from a very academic family where high levels of thinking, PhD’s are celebrated, so meditation did not come easy, but it has allowed me to move from being held hostage by certain thoughts, to seeing them as one among many that just pass through and don’t need to be taken as a TRUTH to obey and follow all the time

SG: We’ll end this Writers Chat, Adrie, with some short questions:

  • Mountains or beach? Mountains (I live at the base of Mt. Mansfield in Underhill, Vermont)
  • Laptop or longhand? Laptop
  • Coffee or tea? Decaf coffee and decaf tea (caffeine makes me really jittery)
  • Boat or plane? Plane (oddly I often feel no fear of death when I’m flying) whereas boats in deep sea terrify me)
  • What are you reading now? Currently I am re- reading mostly school/teaching oriented stuff for classes, like Sara Lewis’ book SPACIOUS MINDS: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism and Ethan Watters CRAZY LIKE Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche as well as Tracy Kidder’s biography of anthropologist/doctor/global humanitarian Paul Farmer entitled Mountains Beyond Mountains. I just picked up my friend and poet Bruce Weigl’s book again called SONG OF NAPALM as well as David Foster Wallace’s small and beautiful book based on his Kenyon college graduation address entitled THIS IS WATER.

Purchase The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems direct from Duke University Press here.

Sepia photograph of Adrie Kusserow wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat looing into the distance.
Photograph used with permission of Adrie Kusserow.

With thanks to Kristina Darling and Duke University Press for the advance copy of The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems.

Short story collection, Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 69: Mary O’Donoghue on “The Hour After Happy Hour” (The Stinging Fly: Dublin, 2023)

Mary, you are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss your short story collection The Hour After Happy Hour, a collection which has been described (rightly!) by Mike McCormack as “Measured and ceaselessly inventive.”

Cover image of The Hour After Happy Hour showing the title and author name in white writing with an illustration (of women) in shades of blue. Courtesy of The Stinging Fly.

SG: You’ve stated on Arena that The Hour After Happy Hour took ten years to write and in The Irish Times that “The book moves through waiting places and limbo states, very often situated in emigration and transit.” Can you talk about what the act of writing means to you – do you think it is in and of itself a limbo state?

MOD: Thank you for hosting me as part of your series, Shauna. I’m pleased to be in conversation with you. Yes, the stories in the book travel the course of ten years, during which time I, a Clarewoman, have lived and worked in both the southeast and northeast of the United States. The oldest story in the book is “The Sweet Forbearance in the Streets,” written in 2013; the youngest story is the closing story, “The Rakes of Mallow,” written in the early weeks of 2023. So, a decade’s worth of work. Your question accurately captures the act of writing as a limbo state. If we factor in waiting to state of limbo, then so much of writing is waiting. Waiting for a form, a voice, an image upon which the mechanism of a story, or indeed a poem, might turn. Writing might also be considered a liminal condition: transition or threshold. And honest process demands that the writer succumb to change and crossing over.

SG: Oh that’s a wonderful way into process… waiting, and then succumbing to change and crossing over. The opening and concluding stories, both titled “The Rakes of Mallow,” I thought, were brilliant. To me it felt like you distilled the essence of the emigrant experience through the lens of gender. Could you comment on this? 

MOD: The opening story “The Rakes of Mallow” was written in 2015. Not until much later did I realise I had some unfinished business with that story! In the first version I wanted to explore a small and collective emigrant experience: shared disappointments and sorrows, defiant efforts to ‘work one’s way back in’ to the country of origin, which is very clearly Ireland. The story takes its title from the 18th century song (which has had a 20th century life). In the song those rakes know themselves for “Beauing, belling, dancing, drinking/ Breaking windows, cursing, sinking.” And that “sinking” crystallized the first “Rakes” story for me: disobedient, disarrayed, disappointed Irish emigrants who were surely male and “still for Mallow waters crying.” Ten years on I wrote the story anew, this time from the perspective of women and women-identified emigrants. The second “Rakes” is more widely choral, non-protagonist centred, and in solidarity with other emigrants who are not necessarily Irish. And perhaps the biggest difference of all is that the second “Rakes” are more defiant. They decide not to go home. They come close, but they don’t give in. They will not give up their independence. I’m fond—differently fond–of both branches of the “Rakes” family.

SG: Thanks for such insight, Mary. And through the “Rakes” family you also capture the push-pull of belonging and the outsider. In “At the Super 7” – possibly my favourite story in the collection – you capture a wonderful sense of both loneliness and despair with an uncomfortable undertone. Identity, it would seem, is given by virtue of being a father, an identity which the protagonist holds onto dearly. When this is gradually eroded, he is unable to read signs, or accept his new (or non?) place in his son’s life.

“Anger teemed through him. A gale of hurt and dread.”

The lack of drama only serves to build on this anger and yet there is such sadness in the story. Can you talk about that see-saw of emotions?

MOD: I’m glad you like this story. It surfaced one evening in Boston as I walked past a hotel I’d been walking past for many years, seeing the same doorman through those years. The hotel is near a train station. I imagined this doorman taking a train as part of being in a new relationship. Those elements in play, I began to explore what a close but intense brush with parenthood might mean to him. I’m interested in parental roles that include step-parenting (I’m a stepmother), guardianship, proxy parenting. The protagonist of “At the Super 7” is ardent in his guardianship of his girlfriend’s son; he is proud of what this new role has afforded him. When his chance at that other life is ‘eroded’—I like your word here—he wishes to persist in that guardian role, and goes to extremes, and wilfully misses his ex-girlfriend’s cues and requests. I find him fueled more by love than anger. His drive from Boston to Florida is an extravagantly long, sad gesture that’s also beautiful in its commitment. Following him on those journeys allowed me to rest the fiction awhile in places I find enchanting for their melancholy: the motels, small towns, and flashy beaches he comes to know all too well over the course of his campaign to remain relevant in the boy’s life.

SG: That’s what really struck me – he is fueled more by love than anger, contrary to what we might assume of a male protagonist. Many of the characters in the collection are seeking something; many don’t know what it is that they seek. I felt that the placement of “Mavis-de-Fleur” next to “At the Super 7” made these two stories talk to each other about what it means to parent, to love, the need we have to be constantly seeking, and the sense of a widening disconnection. Can you talk about these themes?

MOD: I’m interested to hear that you found symmetry between “Mavis-de-Fleur” and “At the Super 7.” It’s not something I noticed as I placed those stories in close proximity. Now that I’m attending to what you’ve noticed, I recognise that they do share a tone, a tone that combines defiance and lonesomeness. The collection as a whole is certainly interested in failed connections—or connections that have simply grown up or given up over time. All fiction might be said to work from within the emotional breach of what is quickly said and what is truly felt. It’s a tremulous balance, and perhaps we find it especially familiar in the twenty-first century. “Mavis-de-Fleur” is my underworld story. In November 2023 I dedicated a reading of the story to my friend David Ferry, the great poet and translator who had recently died at the age of ninety-nine. I referred to having spent a lot of time “among the shades” with David (he translated the Aeneid and Gilgamesh and more). Even the shades are supplicating to be heard and known.

SG: “All fiction might be said to work from within the emotional breach of what is quickly said and what is truly felt.” Beautiful! One of the pleasures in reading this collection is your descriptive and precise language. You create a clear sense of place as well as capturing how your characters are in the given spaces – “Late Style” and “Maenads in the Terminal” are great examples, with the later bringing a wicked humour rooted in reality:

“I had passed through security in hotshot style, lights popping and voices raised high as weapons. I wore zipless, unriveted garments, and a pad that if soaked through in an hour I was to call an emergency.”

Can you comment on your writing process in relation to precise language, for example, adding in details as you edit? Using notes from notebooks?

MOD: Aren’t you’re mischievous to quote that passage from “Maenads in the Terminal”! Well, I work for accuracy—which often means not giving a damn about the proprieties. Let’s just say that that is not the only soaked pad in the collection! Accuracy is a slow, accretive process in my writing. I suspect that the word ‘unriveted’ came early in the making of that sentence; I know I was thinking about metal fixtures setting off security alarms. Maybe Erica Jong came whispering with ‘zipless.’ Thereafter the work lay in building around those words, building a stance, a condition, a psychology, and a grammar. The punctuation of ‘a pad that if soaked through in an hour I was to call an emergency’ is correct, but it makes for an intentionally bumpy reading experience. I’m devoted to grammar and all it can offer a fiction writer. I value punctuation for many of my efforts at precision. Thereafter it’s about layering version upon version upon version of a sentence, until the sentence becomes incontrovertibly itself.

SG: I’m being mischievous while also identifying! I love your explanation of your work building in, on, and around words and layering multiple versions of sentences until each one “becomes incontrovertibly itself”. A broad print for excellent writing.

Well, we will end this chat, Mary, with some short questions:

  • Bus or train? Train for the rakes and the reading. Bus for seeing a city above its subway innards.
  • Fabulous answer! Coffee or tea? Coffee: espresso and steamed milk. (Milk: whole fat.)
  • Quiet or noise when you’re writing? Some background noise when writing; quiet when revising and editing.
  • Your favourite character in The Hour After Happy Hour? A critic once said the only way they could fault Peter Carey was for loving his characters too much. My form might be a little too ruthless to have favourites. But a minor character like Rascal the dog in “S’addipana”—né Raskolnikov—I’m drawn to his simple striving “to find the last flea,” and because he “fails.”
  • What’s the next three books on your reading pile? El Llano in Flames (1950s) by Juan Rulfo, My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley and A Shock by Keith Ridgway (one for rereading).

Thank you Mary for such insightful glimpses into your craft and congratulations again on a superb collection.

Mary will be running a seminar on Tuesday, 13th February 2024 entitled “Writing and Re-Vision” as part of The Stinging Fly Seminar Series. See here for details.

Photograph of Mary O’Donoghue courtesy of The Stinging Fly, July 2023

Thank you to The Stinging Fly for the Advance Copy of The Hour After Happy Hour and to Peter O’Connell Media for introducing me to Mary.

Order The Hour After Happy Hour here.