I’ve had the fortune of working with some wonderful writers and mentors over the last week or two at The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin. I’m now at the stage where my writing needs to simmer. Writing with feedback. Writing that needs editing. Writing that needs re-writing. It’s always good to have a few projects on the go. Part of this process – for me – is to dive into reading. A few of the books that I’ll be immersing myself in over the next few weeks are pictured below:
Fishamble Firsts: An Anthology of First Plays by New Playwrights edited by Jim Culleton (New Island)
Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (Virago)
This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack (Tramp Press)
The Inheritance by Cauvery Madhavan (Hope Road)
A Good Enough Mother by Catherine Dunne (Betimes Books)
Maeve, Welcome to Writers Chat. We’re going to discuss your poetry pamphlet Body as a Home for This Darkness (Book Hub: 2023) which, although a personal tender and moving homage to your late father, is also a consideration on the passage of time and grief. I might add also a congratulations on being placed as a finalist in the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue poetry prize!
SG: Firstly, tell me about the title which seems to encompass the entirety of the collection – notions of body, ageing, time, belonging, family, and the darkness of grief. In the process of putting the collection together, where did the title come?
MMcK: Thank you, Shauna, for your kind words. Yes, you are right, Body as a Home for This Darkness encompasses all you say of body, ageing, belonging and family and is also a reflection on the loneliness of loss and grief. Both are constants in life and yet are something we tend to shy away from. The title of the pamphlet came from a haibun poem I wrote four years before my dad passed away. Dad was no longer the man we once knew yet he became the only man we had left and the title spoke to me of that reality and how dementia strips away the very essence of a person.
Cover of Body as a Home for This Darkness by Maeve McKenna (Photograph provided by Maeve McKenna)
SG: Body as a Home for This Darkness opens with the poem “Him” which introduces us, character-like, to your father. I love your use of lists that paint photographic stills of the man, living, giving, enjoying life until his hands are “grey as putty. In ours.” Could you talk a little about the placement of this poem and its formation?
MMcK: It was important to me during the proof-reading and editing process to begin this book with a memory of my father as the man he was before his diagnosis. Dad was a vital man in our world. He was loved dearly, by his family and friends. He was important to so many. While many poems focus on his later life; ten years in the care home as we lost him slowly, my siblings and I remembered our younger lives and the happiness of those times. Dad was a man of his time, the provider who worked hard and never complained, the one we looked to for advice, the person who made everything ok. The poem ‘Him’ attempts to capture and give the reader an insight into the younger man, the father, the worker and the everyday things that made him who he once was.
SG: And I think it captures all of those things about your dear father. Nature features in your collection, as a harbingers of news. In “Rain knows of Waking”, “Blades of grass are scissors wielding tears”, disturbingly (but accurately), “sadness amputates mind from the thinker” until at the end, “raindrops preen in the reflection of your surrender.” You capture something profound about illness and the loss of control. Do you think that when we’re going through events like this that our powers of observation become more focused on the immediate surrounds, that blades of grass, for instance, take on a deeper meaning and significance, and that in writing these experiences into poetry we are already starting the healing process?
MMcK: Nature features in many of my poems. Something about the temporality of nature, how it comes and goes and regenerates itself year after year, allows me to better understand our human existence. An autumn morning spent in a forest observing the acceptance of an oak tree as it slowly retreats and to return there in spring to watch foliage sprout and burst with colour reminds me of life, the brief time we are here and whilst here there is joy but also challenges that we must accept. I am happiest lost in the woods or strolling along a beach listening, touching and absorbing all the elements around me. Of course to write we must observe keenly, and the image you refer to, ‘blades of grass are scissors wielding tear’ came from an early morning walk in late November near the care home as my father entered the last days of his life. I stopped to watch dew rest on blades of grass and they were tears, mine, but this was the order of nature and the blades of grass bore the weight of the dew with stoicism.
SG: Yes, we can take so much from the order of nature. In the devastating “Leaving”, you capture the solitude of grief, where you get lost on the M50 with your family including
three almost/grown children, tight, really tight…fast asleep
leaving you alone in and with your grief, and leaving you to find your way home. In the title poem, “Body as a Home for This Darkness”, we have more movement, of body, of task, of help as well as dropping back into memory and connection.
Once, you made raspberry jelly when my throat/hurt I’ll ask if I can bring you some…
These poems really stuck with me and I’m curious about your stylistic choice of form. Can you talk about this?
MMcK: Poems often choose their own form. I like to experiment with different forms in second or third drafts. In the case of ‘Leaving’, I felt the form I settled on, a justified block of text, allowed the poem to give the sense of claustrophobia I felt that day driving home from my dad’s funeral. It was in lockdown, we were allowed just ten mourners at the funeral and because of restrictions we had to leave immediately after. The loneliness of that journey home, even though my family were with me in the car, will remain with me forever. Similarly, in ‘Body as a Home for This Darkness’, I wanted the poem to appear solid on the page, that the reader would not be distracted by the format. It is a haibun and I wanted the haiku at the end to convey my dad as a younger, working man, a panel-beater and sprayer, who worked so hard to provide for us.
SG: Thank you for such insight into your process, and your terrible grief. The theme of clothes, how they sit on the body, and how we people are mere movements of clothes is threaded through the collection. I’m thinking here of “Listening for My Dad’s Clothes” and “Three Piece Suit in Rome” which ends with the question so many of us have to ask “Which shirt and tie will we bury him in?” Was this intentional or did this theme emerge when you went to put the collection together?
MMcK: A friend who I share work with pointed this out to me after reading a draft copy of the manuscript. I hadn’t noticed it prior to that. My dad was a dapper man, I never saw him in jeans or a tracksuit! He was neat and tidy and always colour coordinated. Subliminally, this came through in the poems. Many readers have remarked on this and I am glad as this sense of my father always being well-groomed would have delighted him.
SG: That’s lovely – as it also reveals something light and yet shows us the care your dad took not only with his family but himself. There is a nostalgia – through the grief – that your poems also capture, alongside the stark reality of death. For example, the sequence of action in “Breathe” that ends with the heartfelt “What sadness/you taught us to count”, or the visceral “Fortuity” or “Unprotected” where your father’s hands don’t know your hands have released his. In the wonderful “I Want To Go Home”, you capture an almost universal desire that many of us feel at some stage, that we want, not just to go “home”, but that we want to go back to the past, or rather a past without difficult feelings, without loss, without the responsibility of death. Have you – or could you ever? – read these poems aloud? I felt tearful reading them with the rawness.
MMcK: I’ve read ‘I Want To Go Home’ a few times. It is a long prose poem, but is always well received. Audiences seem to like the detail and many have said how the images in the poem resonate with them. As a Dubliner who moved to rural Ireland many years ago, when I visit now I see the city so vividly while also remembering the Dublin of my childhood. And you are right, the poem is about wanting a time that is gone, however good or bad that time was, before the realities of life as we age emerge. I’ve also read ‘Protected’ many times and it is a favourite poem of mine to read. I haven’t read ‘Fortuity’ or ‘Breathe’, two short poems, but look forward to in the future.
SG: We will end with a few light questions:
Coffee or Tea? Tea, but no more than two cups a day. Water mostly.
Sea or Mountains? Sea.
Longhand or straight typing? Both, I write on the hoof in jotters, and at home on the laptop.
Cats or Dogs? Dogs. Our two much-loved dogs, Buddy and Pablo passed away in 2020 and 2022. Both aged 15, they had a great and long life. We miss them still.
What are you working on now? I am currently working on my first full collection which will be part of my dissertation for the MA in Poetry I am currently undertaking at Queens University, Belfast. I am also exploring a long poem book. I have an early draft of a ten-page poem I would like to develop into a full book.
Thank you for your generous answers, Maeve and I wish you continued healing and much success in your MA in Poetry. I look forward to reading more of your work – especially the full collection, when it is published.
Photograph of Maeve McKenna wearing a patterned dress and smiling holding up a copy of Body as a Home for This Darkness with numerous copies of the book in the foreground. (Photograph provided by Maeve McKenna)
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 Timesthat “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.
Shauna Gilligan Writer 