Category: Writers Chat

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.

Memoir, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 68: Phyl Herbert on “The Price of Silence” (Menma Books: Cork, 2023)

Phyl, You are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss The Price of Silence,  A Memoir published in 2023 by Memna Books, Cork and launched, in Danner Hall, Unitarian Church in Stephen’s Green, Dublin in November to a packed room. Congratulations!

SG: Let’s begin with the title which tells us something perhaps about one of the themes of this memoir, and of your life, The Price of Silence. Can you talk about how you came to decide on this title?

PH: After searching through a number of titles, I knew that the motif of Silence was embedded in the storyline ranging from the young girl losing her tongue in the beginning of the book to the fact that there was a total lack of vocabulary to talk about the  abuses she experienced.  Such experiences had no words then.  The final experience of becoming pregnant by a married man which in itself was not a topic for discussion but in l960’s Ireland to become pregnant outside of marriage was not only socially unacceptable but the pregnant woman was treated as a pariah and an outcast.  So Silence was the defence mode of existence.

Cover of The Price of Silence: A Memoir showing a close up sepia image of a young girl’s face.

SG: The Price of Silence speaks eloquently, not just of your own existence, or story, but of what it was like to be a woman in Ireland during these years – the late ‘50s. ‘60s ad beyond – and, in particular, how the body, desires, ambition were silenced and controlled, and how language was used to silence and name. Were you conscious of the power of social history when writing your own story – in other words, aren’t we all formed by place and time? 

PH:  Yes, I was conscious of the power of social history and that is more or less why I wrote the memoir.  I wanted to write myself into existence and by so doing attempt to analyse those decades that I lived through.  Men ruled the institutions, and the voices of women had not as yet emerged, but there was the beginning of movements such as The Womens’ Liberation Movement that were creating platforms where women could express their grievances.  But there was a long way to go. 

SG: The Price of Silence is divided into four sections, and the opening section “Tree Rings” brings us through your childhood by way of sharp memories, many of them sensory, that seem to relate to you as a creative person – writer, actor, teacher – and very much in touch with your surrounds. Can you talk about the importance of where you grew up – that pull between Dublin and Wexford?

PH:  The pull between Dublin and Wexford was deeply felt.  It represented also the pull between my mother and father.  My mother never liked Dublin or the house where she reared her family of eleven children.  But she never rebelled, she never expressed her desires because then a woman didn’t know how to talk about such things.  I felt her lack of expression at a deep level and I think I was always conscious of the need to develop my own language, my own identity.  I was a dreamer at that young age and sought means for escape. Drama and the imagination helped me though.  I wanted to be able to express in words what I felt.  To put a name on a feeling, on a thought.

SG: That deep need to express feeling and thought comes through very clearly in this memoir. Alongside your creative outlets, your teaching career took you around the city of Dublin in secondary education, further education, and prison education with the common thread of your approach to education as what we might call a Freirean approach (echoing Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s belief that educators need to meet people where they are at, rather than the “banking” method of education whereby teachers “feed” information to students and they regurgitate it back again). Do you think this linked in with your approaches to acting and drama and the importance of those in your own life?

PH:  Yes, I believe that our whole lives are about ‘Negotiating into Meaning’ a phrase used by Dorothy Heathcote, Newcastle Upon Tyne University where I studied for an M.Ed. In Drama in Education.  Her philosophy was to provide a mantle enabling the child to find his/her voice.  In the Stanislavski Method of acting, the truth of the character was plumbed into the depths of your own existence, your own humanity.

SG: What pulses and aches right through The Price of Silence is your experience with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. This is your memoir – not that of the man with whom you had a daughter, and nor that of your daughter – but they are both there, with you, even in their absences. Was it a difficult process ensuring that The Price of Silence told your story only?

PH: What a great question.  Yes, it was difficult because I had to protect the identity of my daughter.  She has her own story and that is not mine to tell.  I still didn’t manage to achieve that in that there were times that her voice was necessary to present the story. The birth father is deceased but his children live on.  I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes here also but of course I didn’t reveal their identity.

SG: Lastly, Phyl, the pacing and storytelling of The Price of Silence coupled with how the memoir is structured added such an emotional push to the book that I read it in one enthralled sitting. What advice would you give to those hoping to write their own memoir?
PH:  Everybody is different.  People say to be truthful.  But there is a high-wire balance to be achieved.  It’s not good to be too truthful, there has to be a distancing perspective but at the same time I think an immediacy has to be achieved.  E.G. I wrote some of my memoir in the present tense.  Ivy Bannister says, ‘Think of your life as a train journey, what station will you get on and what is your destination.’  That sort of worked for me.

That’s a great piece of advice from Ivy and yourself. Lastly, Phyl, some short questions:

  1. Quiet or noise when you’re writing?  Quiet.  Or quiet music in background.
  2. Mountains or sea?   Both.  I spent some time in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre.  Bliss.
  3. Coffee or Tea?  Coffee. But not many cups.
  4. What’s the next three books on your reading pile?   Just finished Christine Dwyer Hickey’s ‘The Narrow Land.’  Superb.   ‘The Strange Case of the Pale Boy and other mysteries.’ by Susan Knight. ‘In the Foul Rag-And-Bone Shop’ by Jack Harte. ‘The Deep End’ A memoir. By Mary Rose Callaghan.
  5. A great reading list, thank you! What’s next for your writing?  A One woman stage show about a nun who leaves the convent before her 50th birthday and discovers Tango Dancing as a way into unlocking her repressed emotional life.

That sounds intriguing, Phyl, I very much look forward to it. Thank you for your generous engagement with my questions and I wish you every continued success with The Price of Silence.

Phyl Herbert smiling in a cafe. Photograph by Emer Sweeney used with permission.

Purchase The Price of Silence from Menma Books or from Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street and Alan Hanna’s in Rathmines,  Charlie Byrne’s in Galway.

Phyl Herbert, Mary Rose Callaghan and Liz McManus will feature in Books Upstairs in an interview about memoir writing on Sunday afternoon 28th January, 2024.