Category: Writers Read

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 63: Kevin Curran on “Youth” (The Lilliput Press: Dublin, 2023)

Kevin, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your third novel Youth (The Lilliput Press: Dublin, 2023) which is set in Balbriggan, your hometown. We’re publishing this on Bloomsday as a nod to the importance and wonder of place in the novel.

Cover of “Youth” by Kevin Curran showing a wall, railings upon which sits a young man looking away from the camera.

SG: Let’s start with the title. As I was reading Youth, there were a number of phrases that were repeated so often (for example, “Allow”, “If yuno, yuno”, “that’s a bar”) that I found myself giving the novel alternative titles. However, Youth encompasses not only the communal essence of your four protagonists but also the main theme. Can you talk about the process in naming this novel?

KC: Starting out the working title was ‘Wandering Rocks’ which you can probably guess came from Joyce’s Ulysses. That chapter and the way Joyce swept along the city streets and dipped in and out of people’s lives was one of the main inspirations for the novel. The title Youth was then settled on a year or two later. I seem to like one-word titles as I get embarrassed talking about my work to friends, family and colleagues, and I find a one word response to, ‘what’s your book called?’ keeps things simple and avoids any strange looks or explanations.

SG: That’s interesting, as I picked up on threads relating to Ulysses so it’s like shadows of your first thoughts are still there. On the topic of themes – and so often they only emerge through the writing rather than follow the intentions of the author – it felt to me, though much of the narrative is overtly downbeat, at times despairing, and many of these youth are trapped in circumstance, ultimately Youth is a novel of hope. Would you agree?

KC: 100%. You can’t be around the kids I’ve been around for over a decade and see how they interact with each other and face into the challenges they face and not feel hope. Balbriggan is Ireland’s most diverse and youngest town, so I like to say Balbriggan is Ireland’s future now. And from what I see, the kids aren’t interested in all the anti-immigration rhetoric. In my home town and the school I teach in, diversity and multi-culturalism is a way of life, second nature. Kids from all nations and cultures sit beside each other and become friends despite what noise you hear online. That’s what I experience every day. There’s your hope.

SG: Indeed. It’s like life itself is hopeful, and the online “life”…well, you’ve said it. I’m really interested in the role language plays in Youth. For me, this is what makes it such a stand-out book. While I struggled, at first, to get into the rhythm of not only the voices of our four narrators, but the intent and reciprocation of their language with each other, internally (for example, Tanya), and then with the responsible (or not so responsible) adults in their lives. Could you talk about your intention and the writing process here?

KC: Each character comes at language in a very different way, whether consciously or not.

Angel is trying to fit in and find his tribe through language, which in his case is London slang, his friends’ parents’ African slang, and Dublin slang.

Princess is creating herself through her language, and is mindful that how she speaks will define her.

Dean’s language has been infiltrated by the internet and porn and toxic masculinity and Tanya’s language has been lost to an unfiltered internet flow of reported speech without much thought given to what she is reporting or how she is reporting it. Her language is immediate.

The writing process for everyone – apart from Princess – was to keep the vocabulary quite tight and to work then within the rhythm and confines of a limited vocabulary. In Angel’s case (with thanks to my students) I was able to create a fairly comprehensive slang dictionary that became the foundations for all of Angel’s language, and then Dean and Tanya’s language was again always limited in expression to keep the rhythm and flow. Princess was the only language in an aesthetic sense that I really pushed.

SG: Youth is also being released as an audio book which will be really superb – it struck me that it is a novel that is lyrical in its movement – almost musical (alongside Pelumi’s input) – and yet also cinematic. Place, pace and rhythm are essential components – characters? – in this novel. It feels as if you walked the streets of Balbriggan, if not literally, then in your head, like Joyce did for Ulysses but at the same time, Youth taps into the universality of human experience. Could you comment on this?  

KC: Like you said, I literally walked the streets of Balbriggan for the six years I wrote the book. Even up until the last night before submitting the final draft to the publisher, I was down Mainstreet checking out what type of button was on the traffic light – whether it was a silver circle or silver triangle – to make sure everything I put in about the town was as on point as possible.

Throughout the writing of the book I would either take pictures of things, like the pavements (to get the names of manhole covers, look at the chewing gum stains on the paths) or stand in the street (not obviously – because that would look too weird) and see where the shadows fall and how the street felt at certain times of day and night etc.

I was hoping the deeper I went on Mainstreet and into the town and the estates and the particulars of the place, the more it would become real for the reader, and by extension more universally felt by the reader. It’s the old John McGahern thing isn’t it, the local and the universal.

SG: Thank you for such an insight into your process – and that time, and care, and dedication to place really shows in the writing. Structurally, the narrative of Youth is told in four voices – two male, two female – with every character trying to get beyond their circumstances. It felt, at times, that the voices merged, in particular, the more the lives of Dean and Angel criss-crossed, the more scripted their language and narrative seemed, and as this happens, they start to find ways to be their whole selves not a choreographed online version – through unlikely connections/love and by engaging in every day life tasks – behind the deli in SuperValu; cutting hair. But despite this, they both continue to try and fit into a version of gang culture that is, at times comical, and others, frighteningly dangerous. Dean observes: “Begrudgery, yeah. But something else. Control and an ability to define you. People in this town want power over you.” Could you talk about the theme of power and masculinity through the experiences of Dean and Angel?

KC: Masculinity was central to the book from the early stages. I remember when Moonlight by Barry Jenkins came out I wanted to show the movie to one of my TY classes. 50% of the class would have been Black-Irish and I always tried to bring some sort of representation into the texts we studied. But when the kids heard about the content of the film they didn’t want to watch it. This got me thinking about Angel and Pelumi in particular and how the façade of a dominant, strong, overtly hetro-sexual lad had to be on show all of the time and how drill music in particular with its hyper violent and mysoginistic lyrics again demanded the people rapping take a certain stance. I would talk to some rappers about this (who have since become quite successful within the genre) and they would say it was a pose to gain views, listens, traction, and once they had this they could soften their stance and transition into hip-hop and not be such a caricature.

Dean, with his father being a famous boxer, and literally famous for fighting, offered an interesting insight into the world of masculinity, power and violence when seen through the prism of expectations and family reputations. In Balbriggan growing up (as with all towns I’m sure) there were always family names that carried weight – they were known to be tough and to be involved in fights. But I grew up with some of the lads, and then I taught their sons and daughters and nephews and nieces and you see behind the façade again of this tough living, hard fighting exterior and you realize the pressures they’re under to be this type of person.

SG: Oh that’s a great film and I could see how you’d have loved to use it to initiate real conversations about masculinities. However, if Dean and Angel have family history and circumstances stacked up against them, then Princess and Tanya are overtly fighting and kicking back against patriarchy and a version of toxic masculinity that they try to (subtly and not so subtly) break down. I was interested in the roles of their mothers (and Tanya’s grandmother) in their narratives. I loved how Tanya’s mother gives stark yet loving advice (“Listen to me. That sorta shit isn’t normal. And everyone doesn’t do it.”). In contrast, Princess’s mother is mainly absent, caring for her own mother in Nigeria. Can you talk a little about female relationships and grandmother/mother/daughter bonds in Youth?  

KC: In the novel in general I tried to keep parents as absent as possible so as to let the teenage characters live as freely as possible. But in the case of Dean, his father’s influence became larger as the drafts continued, and Tanya’s father was central to her story. But in the case of Princess and Angel, I wanted to especially cut them off from any adult influence to give a sense of them having to live this 2nd generation life in the town on their own terms. You will notice they are the two who need to work and who basically have to navigate their futures alone.

So, I kept Princess’s mother’s influence sparse because of this need to highlight how alone Princess is in dealing with the obstacles of being the ‘first’ in her family to be born in Ireland and have to deal with this dichotomy.

Florence Adebambo read the voice of Princess in the audiobook and I felt Florence portrayed this brilliantly. Florence was able to subtly show the difference between Princess and her mother and sister. Florence gave the mother a strong Nigerian-Irish accent, and Becky a slighter less pronounced accent, whereas Princess’s accent is unmistakably Irish.

Tanya on the other hand, being Balbriggan born, has the full matriarchy behind her. Her granny was always intended as a strong support, someone we could see Tanya could be herself around and show the reader her softer side around. Tanya’s mother on the other hand was always there to highlight the generation gap, even though, as we learn in the book, there is only 17 years between Tanya and her mother.

But every woman in the book I think comes across as a strong woman, with strong opinions and strong character. It was important Tanya was not seen as a victim, and no other woman for that matter was seen as weak and ‘needing’ the males in the novel.

SG: You’re a teacher yourself, and I liked how you shone a light on both the pressures of and opportunities the education system seemingly offers. For Princess, in particular, achieving in school is what will help her out of her familial and social constraints. She has a colour-coded system of highlighting her text books and uses this same science to observe behaviour, at times with great humour. Observations on trying to obtain work experience in a pharmacy:

“This is my future, my life after all. I’m like, why worry about how you look to this girlo with the blonde hair and Fanta skin? I’ve been raised to stick up for myself. Fight for everything”

“No one should be doing what I’m doing for free…Luminous yellow highlighter, general observation: Cynicism doesn’t come without a cost. Pink highlighter, specific life-advancement threats: Other people will let you down.”

Can you talk a little about the role of education in Youth.

KC: My grandfather grew up in the tenements and through scholarships, made his way to UCD. I was his first grandson to go to UCD and he gave me half the fees for a Masters in Literature in UCD (the other half was funded by the money I got for my 21st party from friends and family!!) I was the only student from my school to go to UCD in my year and even though it was a lonely experience, it was character defining one.

Obviously as a teacher, education is incredibly important to me. I tell my Leaving Cert students every year that the Leaving Cert is the one opportunity they will have in their life to sit and compete with their peers from richer houses, towns and schools – fee paying schools who charge thousands of euros a year – and they can challenge them on an even footing. I know a lot of people give out about the current Leaving Cert exam, but from an English teaching perspective, the exam really gives the students from my DEIS school an opportunity to even up the disadvantages in society they might have faced earlier in their lives, and they will probably face later in their lives. So, yeah, education and libraries as sanctuaries for learning, are central to the core message in Youth.

SG: But not only sanctuaries for learning but for transformation. So much of living in Youth happens on and is dictated by social media – not only for the youth, but also for characters like Barry. From the outset, was this your intention or did this aspect of the narrative evolve with the characters and story? Did you engage in research about social media and the youth?

KC: When you’re around teenagers like I am for the number of years I have been, you can’t help but observe how social media is beginning to alter how teenagers behave and interact. I wrote the story ‘Saving Tanya’ in 2014 for the ‘Young Irelanders’ anthology. In that story I was quite specific with the social media platforms being used, but I learned from that story to kind of pull back from the actual specifics of the platforms but to still deal with social media.

In the case of Tanya I wanted to show that even though she thinks her phone and social media is her comfort blanket, it’s actually smothering her slowly.

The actual form for Tanya’s chapters came quite late in the drafts. I had her firstly as a ‘Living with the Kardashians’ documentary type thing, and then I changed her to a script, but then, finally, I landed on the current form, which I think works brilliantly to display the all-pervasive nature of social media in a teenager’s life, but also to show the real, lived experience behind the posts.

As for Barry, his social media output seems to be representative of a lot of angry, keyboard warriors from his generation.

Research wasn’t too heavy. I was able to chat to my classes – from sixteen year olds to eighteen year olds, and we would discuss what they felt about social media, and what they experienced on-line. The feedback from the girls was eye-opening. Just the hassle almost every girl gets on-line from weirdos (mostly adult men) sending them DMs shocked me.

I also went onto Tik-Tok for a while to get a sense of the dynamic of it. Jesus, that was rough. I deleted the app as soon as I didn’t need to research any more. That place is insane! 

SG: All that for your art! Hats off, I’ve not even watched a Tik-Tok! So, we’ll end this Writers Chat, Kevin, with some short questions:

  • Do you subscribe to or watch anything on YouTube? I don’t subscribe to anything on Youtube, but for the past four months since I finished the novel (and have had a bit of time in the evenings) I reckon I have watched every interview Zadie Smith has given on Youtube. I also watched a lot of Claire Keegan interviews and old writers too like Lorraine Hansberry and Arthur Miller on Youtube. Fascinating insights into craft.
  • Music as you write – and if so, what music? No music. I need total silence and just the sound of the street outside when I write.
  • Mountains or Sea? Sea. Always the sea. I won’t bore you with my swimming stories, but I swim all year round. And no, I don’t wear a Dryrobe.
  • Ha! Longhand or laptop? Always longhand first. Even in the edits stage when I need to extend a scene, add a small bit in here or there, I always write longhand. I find a pen and paper, no technology, no light from the screen, no flashing icons, creates the closest connection with the story and the page.
  • What are you reading now? A Kestral for a Knave by Barry Hines, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery & Manners, Toni Morrison’s Recitatif….the list goes on.

Some great reading there – I recently returned again to Mystery and Manners. I always get something new each time I read those essays. Thanks for such brilliant engagement with my questions and I wish you much success with Youth which can be purchased here.

Follow Kevin Curran on Twitter: @kevlcurran

Thank you to The Lilliput Press and Peter O’Connell Media for an advance copy of Youth.

Photograph of Kevin Curran against a wall of colourful graffiti. Photograph by Elaine McGrath used with kind permission.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 62: Margo Gorman on “Sense of Self Alphabet” – In search of dialogue.

Margo, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your intriguing “Sense of Self Alphabet” which emerged as you “searched for a stronger sense of he self to face the future” after experiencing lockdown and isolation which Covid-19 brought to many and with this alphabet you also hope to dialogue with people.

SG: So this is a “Writers Chat” about a work in progress, a work that is evolving with you, and with the world.  I find it an intriguing idea and an interesting read – it feels like it needs to be a book more than a blog – have you any thoughts on this?

MG: The Blog gives me freedom and hope for a new form of publication which is interactive. I am more and more hesitant to submit my writing to trends in the publishing “industry”. My indie publisher for Michel-Michelle boycotts Amazon so marketing a book is a challenge. The internet creates a certain kind of intimacy and fluidity with more potential for connection. Sabine made me smile when she said she didn’t mind being on the blog as not many people follow it. I hope that will change when I finish the alphabet. I plan to do a summary including comments and maybe share that with friends and other networks. I like the way I can modify the content of the blog.

SG: I can see how the blog gives you so much artistic freedom. What started this project, and why an alphabet?

MG: The alphabet was inspired by discussions on gender fluidity when I published Michel-Michelle. LBGTQ+ is great but it is not enough and as a bisexual Ulster woman I suffered for decades from labels which boxed me in. Like Kathleen O’ Donnell in her novel  Slant, I want to reach out to young people. I am so shocked that they still suffer from gender inequality despite the liberation we fought for in the last century. During Covid, the alphabet merged with notes for a memoir although on the blog I avoid private details of family and friends unless they have given their OK or are dead. The alphabet commemorates ghosts who kept me company when I was in the Covid Cocoon. My alphabet is also a fun wood-wide-web slingshot to the global concern Alphabet INC which holds the shares for Google Services.

SG: In “Age” remembering some events from childhood, you ask “Is a search for hope in the childlike belief in innocence, magic, mystery, and interconnected humanity an illusion?” and perhaps you touch on the duality of human nature – we are both cruel and kind, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. In the same post you recall “I shake the wild mane of red hair over my face, no longer ironed into place, and hope no-body recognises me and tells the family in Ireland.” (This sentiment of shame, and hoping you’re not recognised also runs through O’Donnell’s debut Slant which was launched in Hodges Figgis on 31st May) And both of these thoughts made me wonder that in spending so much of our time trying not to be ourselves, that we still struggle to recognise who we are, at an age when we are led to believe we should be experiencing some sort of wisdom and settling. How can we, when, as a people, we have hardly rooted?

MG: It wasn’t shame which shook my hair over my face. I was just too much of a coward to challenge the double standards which dominated Irish culture  telling us not to make a show of yourself and keep oppression private. It was about protecting my personal liberation of owning my own body. It was too hard to express lesbian or bisexual liberation openly especially in 1970’s Ireland. I left Ireland because sectarianism made it impossible to campaign collectively for Civil Rights and feminism was seen as a distraction from the National Struggle. My sense of self ducked and dived through decades of duality of gender and sectarian polarisation. Now I seek roots in a sense of self which recognises the power of interconnection. Any progress made is not linear. My time spiral is more like the symbol of the Triskele – with its three curved sections from a common centre. 

SG: Interconnection feels so necessary now. In this same first post, you ask Is it possible to connect “pockets of liberation” in the solidarity of a Wood Wide Web?” and it strikes me that what you are doing is walking the land, similarly to Manchán Magan (and his great Listen to the Land Speak), and using this (unlike Magan) to track and link political and societal (and personal) changes in the past with those we are experiencing today. Do you think that in working on the personal that the communal can benefit?

MG: Yes, I do believe working on personal consciousness can benefit communal awareness.  I am a fan of Manchan Magan’s love of nature and language but I also intentionally seek connection between everyday life and economic and social change. The success of LBGTQ+ shows we can merge individual and communal consciousness of gender oppression to gain a majority for same sex marriage in Ireland, but we face greater challenges than that. Our self-image is vulnerable to economic and social forces, which dominate our everyday consumption and degrade human nature and the planet. It might take more than a walk in the woods to develop the potential of an alphabet on gender. I hope my alphabet provokes more exploration of private versus public; or personal versus communal; or human nature versus holistic nature. 

SG: For me it did, and I’m sure for others, too. I’m also fascinated by your examination of Ego and Eco. You say, “Ego needs to win in a battle against opposing forces. Eco needs interconnectedness – a network of interdependence and resolution of conflict” and it feels like it is eco that the world needs more than ever. Can you talk about your connection to the land and those connections to the generations of your family that farmed this land before you. Given the land is in the north of Ireland, I’m curious about two things here, epigenetics and the sense of the land having memory.

MG: For me Eco is an expression of communal ownership of place. Ego expresses individual power and control. My connection to the land where I live now is a mix of Irish sentimental family history and a need to belong somewhere. It was also an economic decision as a site on what was once the family farm was the only viable option for erratic self-employment in Europe after redundancy from Save the Children in the UK. A rural environment fulfilled a material desire for trees, vegetable garden, plants, and flowers. Donegal light creates what Kerri ní Dochartaigh calls Thin Places. The land has a lot more memory and history than four green fields. Donegal  is a good antidote to the limitations of  Ireland’s post-colonial inferiority and resentment. I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland and I I belong on both sides of the border through Ireland but I hope the nationalistic fervour of the last century is past its sell-by date. Vron Ware in Return of the Native: Learning from the land  gives a brilliant exposition of what the land tells us about the social and economic history of humans. She traces the impact of colonialism. capitalism, war, and ecological movements etc. on a small corner of Hampshire in England. This local-global perspective could help us face the huge task of stopping the degradation of people and place which we are all part of today. In Donegal there are still some places where we can find links with people who migrated here 5000 years ago. 

SG: It’s incredible to think of this! Of course it also ties in well to your post under “C for CIS/Closet/Council of Europe/Claire”, your brief exploration your ground-breaking work with the Council of Europe, and of a two-week training course you took with “ACC Au Coeur de la Communication/ In the Heart of Communication”, based on the work of Claire Neur, who is new to me. Given that people like Brené Brown explore the strength in vulnerability, it seems Neur’s theories as you summarise them, “Through exploring our fear of vulnerability, we could find a source of strength” were ahead of their time. It also strikes me that 1995 was a key turning point not only in Europe but around the world. I was teaching in Mexico that year when the rebellion in Chiapas happened (and continues today, as does the inequality).

MG: 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union and the maturity of Thatcher-Reagan economics was a key turning point for me. The shift in the balance of power towards a more global economy created new opportunities for corruption and inequality everywhere. Global finance and powerplay used technology and the internet to speed up exploitation of nature and lead us into more wars and more refugees. Speed, competition, and consumption distract us from a sense of community and connection. The proliferation of self-help gurus is a symptom of the dislocation.  I have found they help me survive  but usually miss the underlying structural causes which lead me to dip into despair. Claire Nuer worked in industry before she got cancer which led her to explore what the holocaust of WWII with its economic and social aftermath had unleashed in our collective consciousness. Her presence stays with me although her organisation was banned in France as a cult! A revenge story from an individual man who was threatened by divorce proceedings. Even anonymous individuals can be destructive to collective consciousness. I was glad to see Claire Nuer was resurrected by the nuerfoundation.

SG: As well as questioning and philosophical, much of the writing is quite poetic for example, talking of the lockdown in Covid, you say, “Memories of the mesh of murmured secrecy in the carved wood of the confessional box in the old church in Strabane wound their way up the spiral of time… Trees help me create a perspective on the time spiral.” It would seem that patterns from your past emerged, uninvited, with old wounds, into your present, and it made me think about time, and how we assume it is linear (at least we are taught to believe this).

MG: For me time is a spiral where linear time and space meet. Linear time is my way of coping with the limitations of my life on planet Earth day to day and season to season. Trees remind me that human life has a variable and short span.  Whooper swans migrating from Iceland to over-winter in Donegal remind me of the hidden connections that bind us together in space and time. A starry night in Donegal reduces the need to pick the scabs of old wounds.  I think of the defiance of women astronomers. The galaxy gives time a different dimension and challenges everyday oppression. I remember old  friends who have dissipated into universal energy. That sounds a bit high flown so maybe time is just a kite that the wind on Murvagh strand can snap from my hand any minute so I take comfort in the memories of past times. My failure as a writer through the  decades vanishes when I look back at my life choices. John Banville once said that he sometimes wished he had lived more and written less. Moi, je ne regrette rien.

SG: In the alphabet (E, F and G) that forms this conversation (and you’ll have written more by the time this conversation is published), you weave links between figures, saints, music, nature, politics and Gay and LBGTQ+ rights, and nature. You give a very personal history of activism and those you met during the years in England and at the same time you manage to connect all of this to diversity in music, therapies, poetry and resisting categorisation.  Everything comes down to asking how (and if) all of these can contribute to undoing the harm to our planet, and to ourselves.

MG: Yes it’s a bit of a mishmash but that’s intentional. The search for connections is a spiral of past, present and future. A lifetime of activism mixed with career has only scratched images in the sand. Faced with a tidal wave of climate crisis, I am searching for hope through the small things that make me feel better. The connections between everyday life in Europe and what is happening in Africa are closer than we imagine. Finance capital reaches into our everyday pockets and helps us dump rubbish on poor people.. Boycotting Amazon or giving up my Twitter account are OK for me with a pension. For a writer trying to sell more books, it’s only an option if we create an alternative movement which sells more of our books through indie outlets than Amazon can. That time will come and then maybe my blog can be a book.

SG: In “H” (Heterosexual, and Holy Halls/ Heilige Hallen), you “ snap a twig into the peaceful silence to protect the grove of memory where trees took root in my sense of self”. In this post, you allow the trees to help you very movingly explore your wounds of childhood through memories of Leslie, a forbidden friend whose family left Strabane for the countryside, while also holding aloft your worries about choices/polarisation of life – rural Donegal/urban Berlin. As in “J for Joy and Jealousy” and K for Kaleidoscope reminds us that how we perceive the diversity around us is important”, the threads between past and present merge and it seems again that if we look after our local (selves), then the universal (community/world) will also benefit. Could you talk about this?  

MG: In 2021, I unearthed the Act Local: Think Global slogan from the last century. This slogan was highjacked by US corporations who used it for marketing products which we consume. The UN targets for sustainable development from the Rio Summit were undermined by marketing campaigns from the fossil fuel industry. They knew campaigns only work if they connect local awareness and action to potential impact at a global level. We could take lessons from that. Planting 12000 saplings in 2021 in Donegal was a symbolic gesture to inspire others but who has time to know or care about it? 

SG: Unfortunately, you’ve captured it – people do care, but who has the time to actively care? I particularly enjoy the references at the end of your posts, and really loved the link to David Rothenberg and the nightingale in Berlin. Stunning. I’m really looking forward to reading more and learning more about fighting the good fight, and the repetition of history, patterns of human behaviour and polarisation (or as you put it US V THEM). So we’ll end with some short questions:

  • City or rural or both? Rural for roots and writing. City for people and proliferation.
  • Laptop or longhand? Laptop since my first in the 1990’s because it gives endless opportunities for editing. Longhand when I want to delve into my sense of self.
  • Cat or dog? Dogs because of their sixth sense
  • Boat or plane? Boat to get on and off the island but train is my favourite mode of transport so Germany is my second home.
  • What are you reading now? I like reading Irish writers from the Irish Writers’ Centre WORD Group such as your novel, Happiness comes from Nowhere. I dream of sustainable  cultural co-operation between writers rather than marketing one of my novels which may have the shelf life of a yogurt. In German I am reading Dörte Hansen’s Zur See which is an allegory for island life in this century. Her fictional island in the North Sea is an expert exposition of relationships between people and our environment. Tourists romanticise the life on the island and are unaware of the social and economic history they are part of. Big business is everywhere. Instead of B and B with locals in the last century there are hotel spas with Wi-Fi. The local crabbers no longer catch their own crabs. Parenting, creative life, making a living, belief systems, aging on the island are chronicled with the seasons and family history. The grounded whale is a reminder of the big wave which the traumatised “skipper” of the ferry survived when the fishing trawler was swallowed up by the sea. It’s a reminder Ireland is an island.
  • What are you writing now? I have a novel ready for publication but I am hesitant to go ahead. The German translation of my novel  Bone and Blood dominates my current writing time. A group of us have a proposal to do a commemoration in 2025 in Berlin of Irish women who  were imprisoned in Ravensbrueck concentration camp during World War II. Cathi Fleming from Cork has researched Sister Kate Mc Carthy and others who worked in the resistance to fascism in France. It would be great if there was a chance to do something in Ireland too so all interest welcome.

Thank you to Margo for her enlightening answers and I look forward to continuing to follow her alphabet series.

Margo’s novel Bone and Blood can be purchased on Books.ie

Margo has included details of some of the publications she mentioned in her answers: Dörte Hansen’s Zur See published by Penguin; Kerri ní Dochartaigh Thin Places; Vron Ware in Return of the Native: Learning from the land published by Repeater books; Nuer Foundation http://www.nuerfoundation.org; Shauna Gilligan Happiness comes from Nowhere published by Ward Wood.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 58: Liz McSkeane on “What To Put In A Suitcase” (Turas Press: Dublin, 2022)

Liz, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on What To Put In A Suitcase (Turas Press: October 2022) – a thought-provoking collection of sixteen stories that explore our everyday interactions and how we form our world, and transform it, for better or worse. Let’s start with the intriguing title (and provoking cover artwork) – What To Put In A Suitcase – I took it to refer to the essentiality of life and living, the people, things that we cannot do without. Can you speak a little about the genesis of the collection and the title?

Cover of “What To Put In A Suitcase” by Liz McSkeane – colourful art work depicting a smiling face

LMcS: Thank you, Shauna, for inviting me to take part in your Writer’s Chat series and to reflect on What to Put in a Suitcase as a whole, and in relation to the themes you have identified. Concerning the genesis of the collection – these stories were gathered over a long period of time. Some were written more than a decade ago but about two thirds were written in the last few years. When stories in a collection span a long period of gestation, it’s perhaps inevitable that they will delve into different topics, expressed in different styles and genres that reflect the writer’s current preoccupations and interests. That’s how it was for Suitcase.  And I did find myself asking at a late stage, what was the best way to pull these apparently diverse elements together.

At that point, I had just written the most recent story – which also gave me the title for the whole collection.  The story What to Put in a Suitcase was inspired by very recent events but is obviously also relevant, on a literal level, to many other geo-political crises of past decades which have resulted in mass movements of populations. It seemed to me that that title provided a kind of thematic umbrella within which the other stories could be contained, whether in a literal, or thematic, sense.

As you suggest, the process of making very practical decisions about which material possessions to take with them when starting out on a journey into the unknown, will distil the people’s vision of what life could or should be about; and also, about how they may prepare themselves to cope with uncertainty. It is a question that I have sometimes asked myself.  I think that the question also works on a metaphorical level, for what is life, if not a journey into the unknown, where we have to decide along the way what to keep and what to leave behind?

SG: Very interesting that your most recent story became the title story and that of the collection, and, as you say, so relevant to current events. I loved how many of the stories involve chance encounters where one or other party has expectations that are not met, or misunderstood, or where there is the potential for change that could have a ripple effect. It’s those Sliding Doors moments that happen to us all – quiet regularly. I’m thinking here of “Samaritan”, “A Hot Coffee”, and the opening story “Regression Analysis”. In “A Hot Coffee” we are told “The only reason she is here, handing this person a Fairtrade coffee in a recyclable cup, is because he is there.” It’s this interconnectedness that you explore so well in the collection. Can you talk about that?

LMcS: I am interested in what you say about chance encounters and the conflicts, anxieties and challenges these present and I think you’re right, that these encounters may appear trivial, but can force the characters to review their way of thinking and perhaps, generate epiphanies. Although the stories you mention are very different in terms of the actual events they depict, thematically they push the protagonist out of a particular comfort zone into a space – physical, psychological, emotional – where previously unquestioned certainties, or even just habits, are thrown into doubt. This in turn causes the narrator to examine not only the situation, the other person or people with whom they are interacting, but also themselves, their own attitudes, prejudices, assumptions.

Of course, this potential for change is not always realised – rather, it may be held in abeyance or else avoided, ignored, so that the habitual comfort zone is reasserted, albeit with a level of discomfort. And sometimes we are not even sure if the character will make any change as a result of what they have experienced. I guess I have an inclination not to wrap things up in certainties and often prefer to leave the reader to interpret, infer, to reflect on the possible actions, or lack of them, that might ensue.

SG: Yes, I liked how you made the reader work, that many of the stories leave us thinking. Children feature in many of the stories and I felt you captured that sense of childhood where wonder is gradually or suddenly replaced by a sense of loss or disappointment – reality – that you sense, as the reader, will sit with them forever. In “Ambush” we see the cruelty of adults trying to protect their own and in the poignant “The Games”, Kate knows “All the lochs and fields and rocks as far as you could see belonged to Donald” and believes her sense of self and identity is like one of those rocks, until she dances, and the rhythm of the music is not what she expected. In this story, her tears come with the onset of kindness. Again it struck me that when the expectations of people – adults and children – are at odds with their situations, shifts of self and future occur. Does this tie in with your intentions when you wrote these stories?

LMcS: I didn’t have a conscious intention to depict primal disappointments met in childhood but in telling the stories that spoke to me, I agree with you that that is one of the most salient themes in some of the stories.  I think that the impulse to make sense of the world starts at a very young age and the children in these stories experience the multiplicity of meanings, which are sometimes in conflict, in a very intense way, which can be confusing.  

     I think that such confusion is almost inevitable, as the messages we receive from the external world about almost everything – how to live, what is right and wrong, even who we are – are fraught with contradiction and, as we learn as adults, sometimes deliberately manipulated to serve the needs of others. Obviously, the children in Suitcase don’t consciously frame their experience of the world in that way but the reader looking over their shoulder can sense it and observe their puzzlement at the often conflicting messages they receive.  And it is true, what they want and expect does not always correspond to external reality.  I get the feeling that navigating this inevitable discord will filter into how these children manage their lives as adults. In fairness, though, I can’t in all honesty say that I consciously set out to explore those themes when I sat down to write the stories. Rather, they were the ideas that emerged in the process. For me, that happens quite often, perhaps most often – that the primal concerns and themes become clearer – though not necessarily completely clear! – in the process of writing.

SG: And often what emerges in the writing can be the most interesting to the reader! You captured shifts in sense of self within the confines of different bodily spaces, and examined the chasm between internal and external selves/voices against the backdrop of gender and space particularly well in “Underground”, and “Lebenstraum” where second person narrative works brilliantly:

“Powerful forces are ranged against you. Many are arising from within: from your currently dormant best self…a distant second, good manners…and from without: the tyranny of these people in their group…”

Do you think – within the realm of these stories – that our perceptions of self have shifted with the restrictions on movement over the last few years?

LMcS: I think that they have been heightened, to a significant degree and that sometimes, a sense of urgency emerges that might have not been there before to the same extent. Before the pandemic, the character in Lebensraum would not have minded sharing a table with other people in a café. It’s the crisis that produces her outrage at the invasion of her personal space.

     I found this scenario interesting, because I think it puts the spotlight on a dynamic which existed long before the pandemic and perhaps, has always existed:  a constant negotiation, a jostling, between the self and the boundaries with other selves.  What the restrictions did, I think, was to highlight the importance of a newly scarce commodity – space – and show how this plays out in interactions with others. And in this case, as often happens, some people decide to take all of this scarce resource for themselves, or at least try to, convinced of their own entitlement by spurious justifications. This, in turn, confronts the protagonist with the question of how to  defend her space or whether she should, and even, whether she has the right to do so.  

       Although this is obviously a ‘pandemic story’ I think I could have written a very similar encounter outside the context of the pandemic, as these struggles for resources – be that space or any other valued commodity – were not created by the circumstances following the lock-downs, but were highlighted by them. That is why I called this story Lebensraum, which as you know, was one concept that underpinned the Nazis’ rationale for annexing European territory, invading other people’s countries. Tragically, we see this being repeated today in Putin’s Russa.  Competition for resources, both tangible and intangible, has always fuelled the dynamic of interaction, on a personal, societal and also, a global level. It is a struggle which this story shows being played out in impulses within the individual human heart.

     Aggressive colonisation, invasion, the story concludes,  has to be resisted, starting with how this person conducts her personal interactions. Is she going to give up her spot to keep the peace? Or should she dig her heels in and refuse to be pushed out. And if the latter,  where does this leave tolerance, compassion, simple kindness? There is a time to yield, to be kind – and a time to resist. The challenge is, knowing which is which. It’s not an easy question to answer.

SG: I think you caught the tension of that question, Liz, so well. Interestingly, the placement of “Atlanta” and “Venice” side-by-side in the collection gave a wonderful continuity to the themes of the failing body and illness, located/dislocated in place and between people. In “Venice” a friend’s embrace fills the narrator

“with yearning and overwhelmed her with loneliness and longing, not for him, but for the desire to want him and everything that being with him would bring.”

I thought the title story “What To Put In A Suitcase” tied these themes together, creating an almost filling up then emptying out of a life, and its meaning – including our relationship to time. What interested you about exploring these themes in this way?

LMcS: I think that some of the stories do explore the notion that the awareness of loss is an inevitable part of living. To arrive at an acceptance of that truth is a different, more complex journey and I am not sure that most of the characters in these stories – with the exception of the final story, Leopold’s Violin – have accomplished that yet. Perhaps they are just embarking on that journey. At least two of the characters in Suitcase are confronted with a heightened sense of mortality, their own or other people’s, which for them is a kind of rite of passage, a point beyond which things are never the same. It is an  awareness does call into question their relationships with others, their aspirations, what to keep, what to change, what to leave behind. Like packing a suitcase!  One response would be to throw in the towel, retreat to a kind of apathy that refuses to decide, as nothing matters anyway.  And yet, these characters respond to loss by giving up but rather, by re-making. We may not know what they are going to do, but I think there is a sense that they will do something, make some significant change that will integrate their life experiences into how they live their lives into the future.

     Once again, I have to confess that I didn’t consciously set out to explore these themes. Rather, they emerged within the stories I found that I wanted to tell.  Perhaps it takes some time and distance – and an attentive reader! – to process them in a systematic way.

SG: Or perhaps, readers bring their own systems and patterns to what we read! To finish up, Liz, some fun questions:

  • Tea or Coffee?  Tricky one. Tea at home, coffee when out. I used to drink gallons of coffee, especially while I was writing, and eventually decided to cut down. So I only very occasionally have a coffee at home, but when I do, I go to a bit of trouble – I have one of those old-fashioned Bialetti percolators that takes forever.
  • Mountains or Sea? Definitely the sea. I have often thought I would like to live in Madrid again for a while (I lived there when I was a student) but I know I would miss being close to the sea if I was there for any length of time.
  • Trad or Disco? Neither. For me, it’s tango all the way. An addiction.
  • Music or quiet when writing? I can’t write when there is music on as I find my attention being pulled towards the melody, but I can filter out most other noises. Except the angle grinder. There’s a construction site nearby at the moment and as soon as the angle grinder is switched on, I grab my laptop and head for a local café.
  • I would defy anyone to create with an angle grinder switched on! What’s next on your reading pile? At the moment I am reading the final volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle and when I finish that, I have Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait to look forward to; then a book I know nothing about – always exciting – which I got as a present, The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout; then the new George Saunders short story collection Liberation Day. So many books, so little time!

Thank you, Liz, for engaging with my probing questions. I wish you every deserved success with this collection of stories.

Author Liz McSkeane in the Irish Writers Centre at the launch of What To Put In A Suitcase (Photograph courtesy of Liz McSkeane)

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With thanks to Turas Press for the advance copy of What To Put In A Suitcase