Category: Writers Chat

Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 67: Maggie Feeley on “Just Killings”(Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 2) (Poolbeg Crimson, 2022)

Congratulations on the second book in the Alice Fox Murder Mysteries. We last chatted about the first book in the series, Murder in the Academy (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1) (Poolbeg, 2021) and it’s great to be back with Alice and Caro in a slightly changed Belfast setting.

SG: Let’s go back to your writing, now that you’re deep into a series of novels – or is it a trilogy? Tell us about character development from book to book, in particular, our heroine Alice. I feel she’s grown in insight and confidence in the second book, (or maybe I know her a bit more). Does this relate at all to your experience in writing Just Killings?

MF: You’re right Shauna. The third Alice Fox mystery Wrestling with Demons was published by Poolbeg in August 2023, so I’ve got as far as a trilogy for the moment. Alice and I, and the other characters that carry forward from the first book, are all developing together, I’d say. I can’t claim to fully understand how that growth in each character comes about but I am coming to know each of them in an instinctive way and to understand how they will react and behave in each new context. I don’t feel that I am manipulating them to suit the plot rather that the context comes first and then they become more and more fully themselves against that backdrop. In this case, confronted by the distinctive signature murder of two men of the cloth, the Murder Squad with the help of Alice Fox, begin to investigate why these particular victims might have been murdered.

I’m influenced by reader feedback to some extent and think now about the amount of explanation I include. I’ve learned that readers don’t always want to know a lot of the detail I might serve up and so I’m more inclined now to withhold some of what I know about the people in the books. People like to create their own version of characters and I need to leave space for that to happen. At the same time, I’m not a pushover and when someone says they don’t want to read about social justice issues then I think, you’d better read someone else’s books because for me absolutely everything is about some form of in/equality.

In Just Killings Alice has settled into life in Belfast. She has links in Dublin and her work with young people in West Belfast fills the space left by her work in the College. As the work with the EXIT youth group deepens so do the relationships she makes there and we learn incidentally through these lives about the past and present in Belfast with the special legacy issues that the Troubles have bequeathed to people there. Individuals, families and communities have been coloured in by their particular history with the war and Alice, as the outsider, allows us to observe the detail of that in the day-to-day present. For the same reason there will always be an all-island element to the books as although some people identify almost entirely with one jurisdiction, others are constantly balancing the awkward reality of belonging in both places.

SG: I love the notion that you are growing with and as your characters grow and develop! Just Killings, unlike Murder in the Academy is framed not so much by Alice Fox’s own story but by differing government and societal responses north and south of the border to the revelations of institutional abuse by priests in the Catholic Church, and the Murphy and Ferns reports. We open with a rather gruesome description of a murder – I felt like I was in the Netflix series Criminal Minds – which firmly connects these threads. From our last Writers Chat, I know you like the story to lead you, rather than have it plotted out. Did this opening scene come at the start of the drafting process and then lead on to the second murder or did you work out the details at a later stage? 

MF: I’m always surprised when people say they are taken aback by the way that I can produce such gruesome murder scenes that don’t match their understanding of me. In the first book I found the murder hard to create but it’s becoming easier with practice! I’m not sure what that means for the future…  In the case of Just Killings I actually began with the murder that is discovered in the church in Belfast and added what becomes the initial Wicklow scene some time afterwards when I began to incorporate the Ryan report findings into the story. The structure unfolds gradually as the plot develops and I move pieces around to suit that.

You are right that I always see the structural framework behind individual and community social practice. The connection between clerical abuse in parishes and institutional abuse in Irish industrial schools has always been clear to me. The abuse by clerics of women and girls, boys and vulnerable young men was widespread for much of the last century and fictionalising those events, or their consequences absorbed me. I am familiar both personally and academically with the minutiae of how the patriarchal church and state behaved when those abuses took place and how they responded as the subsequent inquiries proceeded. I remain unconvinced by their acts of contrition and incorporating that into a murder mystery allows for the personal impact of those criminal events to become imagined and elaborated.

SG: Thanks again for the great insight into your writing self, Maggie, how a certain type of writing might be difficult at first, but with practice becomes more manageable, or familiar. A key theme in this book, for me, was family and society’s definition and denial of it. I really enjoyed how various characters’ experiences of this were shown in parallel narratives. We see-sawed from Jed’s search for answers to his family’s hidden history to Alice and Caro’s open making of their own history. This threading of the individual/ communal as much as Alice Fox links all your books. Can you talk about these links?

MF: In the 1980s, feminist Barbara Demming published We Are All Part Of One Another and cemented for me the belief in our irrevocable interconnectedness. I see feminism as the antithesis of all things patriarchal and families in their diversity are another site of that struggle. The Irish church made use of the family structure and women’s role in it to support its own power and influence at the same time as it was covertly causing havoc in individual lives. Those individual hurts and harms that were perpetrated by members of the clergy against vulnerable people placed in their care were inexcusable. As were the behaviours against those who trusted the holy personna they projected and then betrayed. The survivors of these abuses became communities of the wronged whose damage extends across generations and who, with their allies, have struggled to get some kind of recognition of how the patriarchal church has offended against them. In Just Killings I take the liberty of hitting out against the hypocrisy of the church and imagining what would happen if the victim claimed some measure of personal justice. I do believe strongly that it is solidarity that can take down oppression and Alice and Hugo as well as the survivor communities north and south are the expression of this in Just Killings.

SG: Yes, this sense of solidarity is what Alice hones and fosters in both herself and those she works with. Just Killings not only takes place in Belfast but spans the island – from the second murder site, to discussions of institutions in the West of Ireland. While this is a work of fiction, it feels that many of the fictitious institutions are based on real places. Are you at liberty to discuss your research and reading, besides the influence of your other publications such as Learning Care Lessons, on the societal structure, class and disadvantage.  

MF: Just Killings is a form of historical fiction in that it is based on the reality shared with me by survivors of abuse. From 2002-2007 I carried out an ethnographic study in the community of survivors of abuses in Irish industrial schools. I was particularly interested in their memories of the learning of literacy in those institutions and how the absence of care impacted on the capacity to learn. It is not by accident that there is a literacy thread in all my books. I have been involved in adult literacy learning for most of my working life and am clear that literacy is a real barometer of in/equality in society. From my immersion in the survivor community I gathered stories and details of experiences that allowed me to write Learning Care Lessons: Literacy, love, care and solidarity. Having unmet literacy needs is directly linked to all forms of inequality and disadvantage. In my research, care was uncovered as a vital element in learning and it is ironic then that those taken from their families into the care of the state were deprived of the most minimal level of literacy learning.  Those who preserved even some small element of familial affection were much more likely to learn than those who didn’t. These small loves emerged as hugely significant and always strike me as an undervalued source of social sustenance.

Far beyond the impoverished educational elements of life in these institutions, people shared deeply personal memories of family circumstances, of the isolation a child experienced when deprived of the company of siblings, of physical neglects in terms of hunger and emotional trauma brought about by the constant fear of corporal punishment, humiliation, sexual grooming and repeated assault. Much of what is written in Just Killings is rooted in those and other recollections of adults who survived their time in the care of the state and have bravely shared their truth about what happened behind those closed doors.

What is totally shocking is that the fictional revenge sought in Just Killings is the only detail that isn’t informed by my first hand experience and research. For the most part, survivors were avid adult learners, solidary supporters of their fellow survivors and focussed on making the best life for themselves and their families. Causing hurt to others was not on their agenda.

SG: That is most shocking indeed, Maggie. Thank you for sharing these insights into your research and most caring work. This leads us to our final focus which is the title – Just Killings. Alice reflects on this

It was a very different role to be facilitating the detection and capture of someone, maybe himself a victim, who had decided to punish acts that had incurred little or no punishment inside the legal system. Did that reluctance within the system to bring these abusers to book make it okay for someone to take the law into their own hands? Should those who are wronged be expected to behave more morally than their leaders?

I like how you, and the story, leave the reader to also reflect, without providing answers. Can you talk a little about this, for example, were you tempted to expand on these questions or even answer them for the reader?

MF: Justice is a slippery concept and I’m struck by the way the people that tend to fall foul of the law are often those that the social structures have treated most unequally. Literacy levels are lower in prison than in outside society and the two-tier Irish education system is allowed to persist and perpetuate these inequalities. It often seems as if state systems are constructed to protect the powerful, even when they behave in a negligent and harmful manner and at the same time to find the least influential at fault for even minor misdemeanours. Childhood institutional abuse, state sanctioned mother and baby homes, Direct Provision for those seeking assylum and protection from torture and ill-treatment in their country of origin are examples of systems exposed as critically flawed yet where the damage experienced is slow to be acknowledged and reform comes far too late for many users. Those who are harmed in these structures past and present are not known for fighting back.

In Just Killings I was imagining what revenge might look like in the context of institutional and clerical abuses. I am not a believer in violence as a means of tackling injustice. War is an extreme example of how physical fighting does not resolve disputes and where justice is easily dropped from the agenda. Nevertheless in fiction and especially in crime fiction I think there is room to raise the hypothesis of a ‘just killing’ in order to bring the underlying contextual factors into question. I leave the questions unanswered because the important issue is always social inequality of some kind and reconfiguring that is the only action that can lead to just and lasting solutions.

SG: Well, I would love to see, instead of just killings, a just society! Lastly, Maggie, some fun questions:

  1. Coffee or Tea? I have always preferred coffee to tea but now a chronic bladder condition prevents me from having either unless all caffeine is removed which seems a bit pointless. My current favourite herbal tea is liquorice.
  2. Dogs or Cats? I admire the self-centreredness of cats however my wife Ann is allergic to both so my admiration has to be from afar.
  3. Most surprising reader reaction to your Alice Fox Murder Mysteries? After reading Murder in the Academy someone went on a weekend mission to Belfast and did an Alice Fox tour retracing all Alice’s movements. That surprised me quite a lot!
  4. I love that! What writer would you most like to have afternoon tea with? I’d like Claire Keegan to let me into her secret of writing short, rich and absorbing stories.
  5. What are you writing now? I’m having a break while moving house, incubating Alice Fox 4 and dabbling in some short story writing.
Photograph courtesy of Maggie Feeley, showing Maggie, seated in a garden with daisies behind her. She smiles with a blue-eyed gaze to the camera wearing a blue shirt.

Thank you to Maggie for her insightful answers, particularly about her writing processes, research and passion for social justice that lie behind many of her novels. I wish her much continued success and many more eager readers!

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 66: Alison Wells on “Random Acts of Optimism” (wordsonthestreet: Galway, 2023)

Cover of Random Acts of Optimism showing painting of a desert landscape with a ticking clock in the foreground and a red-leaved tree with a woman’s face peering at the clock. Image by Beatrice Mecking, courtesy of wordsonthestreet.

Alison, You are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss your short story collection Random Acts of Optimism which has been described by Billy O’Callaghan as “a genuinely marvellous collection”. Published by Galway based wordsonthestreet, it was launched in dlr Lexicon on September 20th. Many congratulations.

SG: Let’s begin with the title Random Acts of Optimism, which is a theme that runs through each story – despite the diverse forms within the collection – and, in my experience, optimism is the feeling with which are left with when we’ve read each story. Can you talk about how you came to decide on this title?

AW: When I came to write the title story I recognised that for Cynthia and Tom and for many of the other characters in my stories they were often taking action in spite of or in defiance of the constraints of their circumstances. The acts of optimism we take in our lives can run from stand out courageous acts to the everyday doggedness that so many people display as they push through difficult periods of life, as losses mount up over time or as we all faced during the pandemic years. Personally, I am also fascinated by psychology and how we convince ourselves of things, we can be courageously optimistic but sometimes optimism becomes delusion and that has been the subject of several of my novels as well as the stories in the book. For me, also, Random Acts of Optimism also relates to my own long journey as a writer, and also for every writer, trying to find the right words, reach people and hopefully get published. I’ve explored these themes in my writing blog Head above Water and hope to work with people to support them to maintain optimism in their writing lives.

SG: That’s very moving – working to help people maintain optimism in their writing lives. Something so very much needed. I really loved the opening title story – the characters, the narrative but also how you used the page to communicate some of the clinical ways our society was run during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It’s a heart warming story of connection blooming in adverse conditions. In particular the use of humour to fill communication gaps:

He doesn’t know what else to say so he tells her about a woman who returned a book two years too late. The book was called Successful Time Management for Dummies.

Can you talk about the origins and writing of this story?

AW: This story was rooted in my real experiences of the surreal and poignant experience of being one of a few library staff members sending books out to ‘cocooners’ during the Covid19 pandemic from a vast empty library. (The Lexicon library, currently the largest library in Ireland). Many conversations were stark but often a joke was shared and the topic of books always engaged and entertained us.

I also wanted to explore how a male character who is bewildered by his marriage breakup and fallen prey to the anxieties of the modern world  and not really able to make sense of it might begin to find answers through his unlikely connection with an older lady through the libraries and through books themselves. I’ve written (a yet unpublished novel) about a man who loses his way in life but in that case does not find a path back.

I still feel very moved when I think about the “cocooners” at home under often very lonely and vulnerable circumstances. What happened in the pandemic underlines the importance of real human connection (which, by the way, is one of the positives of public libraries with their events, social groups and book clubs) and the power of books and writing to help us feel that connection, understand ourselves and others and just be plain entertained and carried away, even in dire circumstances.

I think writing this story, more than any, allowed me to really depict the stoicism, humour and camaraderie that so many ordinary people have while negotiating everyday challenges. I went on to write several thousand more words of the developing relationship between the characters, so we will see where that goes.

SG: Well that sounds very intriguing, Alison, I really liked those characters and would love to read more. In “There’s a Café in This Story”, you tell the tale of connections breaking down, the importance of place and how necessary it is to keep hope in relationships. I loved the entwining of the inner character with the exterior of the cafe:

There are details that build up over time, the first, shyly uncertain pleasantries, umbrellas under the table, ankles knocking against the metal legs and then against each other. He wonders…. Will the cafes all merge, with all their combined sensations of exhilaration and regret?

Tell me about the structure of this story and how it came about? 

AW: We can use signs around us as scaffolding to reinforce the stories we are telling ourselves. This man, captivated by the idea of this illicit romance, sees the scene and objects around him as part of a rarefied and lovely story. Meanwhile, for his wife, sitting under the infant at home, the discarded coffee cup, her own tea out of reach, the immutable reality of domesticity, objects give a different flavour. Working in Dun Laoghaire, I often walked out on the pier. The sound and scent of the sea, the clanging of the anchors, the gulls were all very vivid, sensation laden images which I used to set the scene and evoke that sense uplift and freedom that the man feels his rendezvous give him.

I liked juxtaposing the man’s reality, his illusion of freedom, movement and magic with the more solid reality of the woman’s life in the alongside their joint memories/experiences of the past. These conflicting juxtapositions are reflected in the images of the servers’ arms criss-crossing,  the struts of the bridge, reaching up to put the star on the Christmas tree.  I think the to-ing and fro-ing between the man and wife’s realities allow us to see two sides to the story.

SG: I liked how seeing the two sides worked. I’m curious as to the order of the collection. I liked how “Sad about the Plumber’s Uncle” worked next to “All that Thinking”, in that the light relief and humour in the first story sets the reader up for the deep thinking in the second. How did you settle on the order?
AW: As you say, the stories in the collection are quite diverse in tone and mood and also what you might call genre, running from realistic to more speculative and fantastical. And as you say, occasionally there was a pretty stark reversal of tone. In other cases, one humorous story follows another but then a reflective element to that story might be echoed in the next. There are some stories about writing or having written (told from the point of view of a letter) and they are close together. To me, the process was similar to the rightness of feeling I felt listening to my favourite albums in the 80s, an instinctive feeling towards tone, poignancy, energy and pause. Sometimes evenness of tone is preserved and at other times the symbols or drums break the preceding silence. I like how the first story throws you right in and how the last story refers to a moment of coming home.

SG: I loved your use of sensory detail and pause in “The Spaceman Has His Tea”. The story has a straight-forward premise yet you created a narrative that is, in its underbelly, a philosophical consideration of the nature of our existence.

Unleashed from the world is not to be free of it, it is to be put in charge of the last egg in the basket, it is to be six years old have your mother put the egg into your hand and say ‘Don’t break that.’ And the earth is as blue as a bird’s egg, as precious as Fabergé, as fragile as Arctic ice. It is to be six years old and afraid of forgetting.

I love that it also concerns the lovely act of drinking tea and “meringue, light, delicious; clouds dissolving on his tongue.” How important are the senses to you when you write?

AW: Like many writers, I’m always pained by the gap between the richness and impact of reality, especially that of the natural world and how well I am getting it down on the page. I can be carried away by ideas and competing narratives, but I think what short work can do best and what I would like my writing to develop into is being more spare, precise, immediate and evocative. The senses are key to that. I grew up in the countryside, was immersed in it, reeds, wind, frogspawn, moss. The natural world evokes a strong feeling and I hope I can put some of that across through different sense impression. Recently I read the writing of Darragh McKeown for the first time and loved the clarity of it. The key to writing is specificity, we know the world through everyday things, what they evoke through senses and memory, what they mean to us. 

We will end this chat, Alison, with some short questions:

  1. Beach or mountains? Beach by a small margin but I grew up in Kerry near the sea with a mountain at my back and now live in Wicklow which also has both!
  2. Dart, train or bus? Definitely DART these days though I spent my college years on the train between Dublin and Kerry leading to many fascinating glimpses of characters.
  3. Do you usually have one book or numerous books on the go? Both writing and reading wise, the answer to this is always many, no matter how much I fight against it. I am endlessly, pathologically curious. I read for my own pleasure, for research for both writing projects and, currently for my dissertation for an MSc in Library and Information Science, I am also fascinated by neuropsychology and creative resilience.
  4. I love the idea of being pathologically curious! Quiet or noise when you’re writing? Quiet. Not easy to find. I used to get up at 5am when the children were young and we built a writing cabin in the garden but once the world gets going, quiet is never easy to find and the noise in my head hard to dodge.
  5. What’s the next three books on your reading pile? I just went to check and counted 50 books stacked up beside the bed! One of the perils of being a public librarian is constant temptations. I am about to read Books on Fire – The Tumultuous Story of the World’s Great Libraries by Lucien x. Polastron, The Creativity Code – how AI is learning to write, paint and think. These will inform future writing projects. I also have Poetry Unbound – 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig ó Tuama put by – his selection of poems and what they mean to him. Just now, with work, study, family life and book launches, this selection is something to steady me, give me pause and interest and settle me down in the moment.  

Thank you, Alison, for such a generous and open attitude to and answering of my questions. I wish you every success with Random Acts of Optimism.

Order Random Acts of Optimism here and follow Alison here.

Photograph of Alison Wells, blonde hair and blue eyes, smiling directly at the camera, wearing a denim-blue cardigan. Photo courtesy of Alison Wells.

Thank you to wordsonthestreet for the Advance Copy of Random Acts of Optimism.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 65: John MacKenna on “Absent Friend” (Harvest Press: Carlow, 2023)

Back and Front cover of “Absent Friend” showing pencil drawing of John MacKenna and Leonard Cohen. Cover image: Lucy Deegan

John, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your latest publication, Absent Friend (The Harvest Press: Carlow, 2023), a memoir and reflection on your friendship with Leonard Cohen. 

SG: Let’s start with the title. It both sums up the friendship now, and how it endures despite Leonard’s death, and also the friendship as it formed and evolved over geographical distance. Did the title come easy to you? 

JMacK: Thanks for the invitation. I’ve long been aware of the tradition in some religious communities of setting a place at table for absent friends – in fact it’s one we’ve adopted in our house. It’s a way of remembering those who are away from home and those who have died and it never fails to bring a moment or two of reflection on some or all of the missing people in our lives. So when I began writing this book the title, more or less, suggested itself. It seemed to sit very easily with what I had in mind as the theme of the book – the friendship and the absence of that friendship after Leonard died.

SG: That’s very moving – your writing as a table with a space for absent friends. It’s quite an incredible story, your lifelong communications with Leonard. How did you work out the structure for the memoir in terms of chronology of friendship/ your own chronological life? 

JMacK: That was a challenge. I had many thoughts on how to approach it but, in the end, I thought the songs are the binding force. The songs are what drew me to Leonard when I was eighteen and the songs remain after he’s gone. So I used the songs and albums as guideposts to the journey of his life and my life and our friendship. And it seemed to work. 

The parallels between events in my own living and the emotions and events gathered in his songs worked in tandem in terms of the writing.  There’s one moment in the book where I’m driving and listening to If It Be Your Will (a song about the holocaust) and I come upon a car accident and that produces its own small holocaust – that’s just one moment of the parallels being shocking. 

But the fact that Leonard was so open and so reflective of his own life – and by extension all our lives – makes the work incredibly accessible, moving, educational and emotionally connected.

SG: There were a few moments in the book where there were uncanny parallels and perhaps these actually connect to your own openness and reflection. You also capture the philosophy behind many of Cohen’s songs that have carried you through rough and tough times. You show us the power of his words and music. Why do you think he’s been painted so often as just writing about the underbelly of emotion? 

JMacK: I had one brother who was ten years older than me and he was a wonderful guide in life. Leonard was eighteen years older than me and I thought of him as a brother, too. So the guidance, the sharing of experience and direction were important to me. But Leonard’s life was radically different from mine – he came from a wealthy, Canadian, Jewish family. And, yet, much of what he wrote about in terms of emotion was blindingly familiar to me –  an innate darkness; a struggle with emotional intimacy; an interest in the spiritual. 

So, yes, he does write about that dark spaces and those muddy waters. What is sometimes forgotten is his wonderful humour – it was quiet but it was always there in his songs, in chatting with him, in his letters and emails. That’s something that is often missed about his personality. And sometimes his dismissal and the dismissal of his songs as razor blade music is just lazy journalism.

SG: And that’s a gift – being able to combine dark and deep spaces with humour. You write about your own relationship to form (books, songs, poetry) as well as the impact and/or influence of teaching (the system) on your creativity. The “links” that pull you in to Leonard’s work are also what work in writing:

an idea, an experience, a phrase, an image

To what extent did you learn or work on your writing craft through exploring Leonard’s songs? (For example, your novel Once We Sang Like Other Men)

JMacK: I first heard Leonard in 1971 when I was recovering from meningitis and I can still clearly remember the shock of hearing a story I was very familiar with (the Biblical story of Isaac) retold in the song Story of Isaac but hearing it told in the voice of a nine-year-old boy. The familiar became the fascinating. That was the first step on a writing road toward the realisation that old stories, familiar characters, well-worn situations can be viewed and re-told freshly. That was inspiring. 

The other thing I learned from Leonard’s work was that less is more – his ability to suggest things is powerful. There’s a line in a very late song about angels scratching at the door. That one verb is extraordinary in what it suggests and how it avoids the cliched. 

The subject matter of a lot of Leonard’s work is the spiritual and that’s an area that fascinates me and, as you say, I’ve examined it in Once We Sang Like Other Men and Joseph. It’s a road we were both interested in, that place where spiritual and human collide.

SG: Yes, that verb “scratching” alongside the softness (perceived) of angels is great. Absent Friend also serves as an exploration of religion. You speak about going to a monastery church in Moone, Kildare

in search of spiritual consolation and calmness

and at length about Leonard’s time in a monastery. How important was it to Leonard and how important is it to you in your writing?

JMacK: Leonard said the monastery at Mount Baldy and his times there saved his life. He went from absolute fame and an absolute dependence on alcohol to a time (six years) of reflection and removal from the demands of the world. It got him back on an even and healthy keel.

For me the quiet times spent at Bolton Abbey are important in two ways. They reconnect me with summers in my teenage years spent working in the gardens there – a wonderful time of ideas and debates and discussions and laughter with the monks. But they also connect me to a way of life that isn’t mine but one in which I recognise the importance of silence, of contemplation, of peace, of communal spirit. 

And that feeds into my writing. As I get older I find myself looking more and more (in fiction and non-fiction) at the place of the human in the world of the spiritual. Belief wise, I’d describe myself as an agnostic but I love the search, I love the things that are part of the monastic life – the internal and external landscapes in Bolton Abbey. And I get a tremendous reassurance and uplift from time spent there. The monks are good men, interesting, funny, they have a depth you don’t often find in the world. 

SG: How do you think you’ll carry Leonard’s legacy forward – in music and in writing – and do you see Absent Friend as part of this process? 

JMacK: I was honoured to work with Leonard on Between Your Love and Mine, a requiem for theatre that we completed in the summer before his death. That requiem has had two extremely successful tours – playing theatres across the country as well as the NCH and Aras an Uachtaráin. The requiem will be restaged next year to coincide with Leonard’s ninetieth birthday so that, I feel, is important. 

I hope Absent Friend contributes, in some small way, to spreading the word of Leonard’s genius as a wordsmith and musician.

SG: I am sure your book has already contributed – we see Leonard through the eyes of a friendship that endured a lifetime. I very much look forward to experiencing the requiem next year. So we’ll finish up, John, with some short questions:

  • Coffee or Tea? Coffee
  • Silence or music as you write – and if so, what music?  Music – I normally choose one CD to listen to per book – for Clare it was 19th century hymns but it could be anyone from Paul Simon to Mary Chapin Carpenter. Always there are words involved.
  • Longhand or laptop? Laptop – except for poems, they’re longhand
  • What are you reading now? Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross – a book on English churches!
  • What are you writing now? I’m redrafting a short novel set in my home village of Castledermot in the winters of 1963 and 2010 – the years of the big snows.
Photograph of John MacKenna wearing a white shirt, looking thoughtfully at the camera. Photo credit: Kevin Byrne used with permission

Thank you to The Harvest Press and John for the copy of Absent Friend. Purchase Absent Friend here.