Alan McMonagle A Question and Answer Session with the Author of Psychotic Episodes

March 1 to April 14

Q & A Session with

Alan McMonagle

Q & A Sessions for ISSM3

Today I am happy to be able to present a Q and A Session with Alan McMonagle, Galway, Ireland, author of a very good collection of short stories set in Ireland,

Psychotic Episodes (My post on the collection is here.)

Author Bio (from his webpage)

Alan McMonagle is a poet, playwright and short fiction writer living in Galway, Ireland. He holds an MA in Writing from National University of Ireland, Galway. He has received awards for his work from the Professional Artists’ Retreat in Yaddo (New York), the Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), the Banff Centre for Creativity (Canada) and the Arts Council of Ireland.

He has published in numerous literary journals. 

Liar Liar, his first collection of stories published byWordsonthestreet appeared in 2008 and was longlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The title story from his second collection, Psychotic Episodes, (due from Arlen House in April 2013) was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize.

You can learn more about his work on his webpage.

1.Who are some of the contemporary short story writers you admire? If you had to say, who do you regard as the three best ever short story writers?

Many of the writers I like are dead:

William Saroyan

Isaac Singer

Sergei Dovlatov

Some of the best:

Raymond Carver

James Joyce

Nicolai Gogol

Of course, this changes all the time.

2. I have read lots of Indian and American short stories in addition to Irish and alcohol plays a much bigger part in the Irish stories. How should an outsider take this and what does it say about Irish culture. There is a lot of drinking in the stories in Psychotic Episodes.

Is there a lot of drinking in Psychotic Episodes? Is there really more drinking in Irish stories? I'm reading a wonderful collection set in Canada at the moment. There's been booze in every story so far. Last week I finished a collection by the Chilean Roberto Bolaño. Lots of booze there. Every great Russian I read seems to know how to make vodka. Alcohol can be tricky. I like drinking and I don't like drinking. It can be fun and it can undo the will like no other substance I've encountered. In Ireland, spending lengthy spells of time indoors is inevitable on account of the weather. 'The Pub' helps facilitate this indoor existence.

3. Declan Kiberd has said the dominant theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father? Do you think he is right and how does this, if it does, reveal itself in your work. I claimed it was a dominant element in several of your stories.

If you take the weak/missing 'father' to mean a lack of guidance - spiritual, emotional, political - then yes, it is a big theme, and not confined to my stories or to Ireland. Of course, a writer can only write from the context of his or her own experience, offer his or her own perspective. And experience and perspective is constantly evolving.

4. when did you start writing?

I started when I was seven and wrote pretty much non-stop until I was twelve. Then I stopped for twenty years. I remember the first story I finished - it was titled the ants who grew into giants. I thought the title was so clever (gi-ants). I remember my father counting the number of words in it and then saying, 'there are more words in this than in your mother's dissertation'. I still think of that as a fine compliment.

5.  

Do you feel Aosdana is the best use of the Irish governments limited funds to promote the arts or do you think the money could be better spent in another way?

In Ireland, there are plenty of people getting paid obscene amounts of money for doing very little; there are questionable financial systems receiving ridiculous dig-outs - this is the pot of money that could be better spent.

6. Tell us a bit about your thoughts about the Masters Program at NUI Galway please? What do you like best, what could be cut, what improvements could be made?

The best thing is that if you like to flit from one form to another - which I do - then this course is a dream come true. The limitation is that you must drop chosen forms at semester ends, which can be frustrating, especially if you are getting into your stride.

7.  Please tell us a bit about your non-literary or non- academic work experience?

I've been an office boy, a greeting card salesman, a packer, a night watchman in an amusement park. Though you wouldn't think it, I spent two summers working on building sites in London. I've also worked in Sydney.

8. In an over the top World Wide Wrestling Battle Royal between a playwright, a novelist, a poet, and a short story writer who wins and how does it play out?

Hah!

The short story writer is trying to beat the record for the longest period of time spent on an opening line.

The playwright is dashing frantically about the place in search of a killer stage direction, a lamp that works and an old piece of furniture (a dresser is my guess).

The poet is reclined in a suitably comfortable chair, and is gradually sucking every drop of water in the ocean through a straw.

Meantime, the novelist is nowhere to be seen because he knows that finishing something is the most important thing.

9. (This may seem like a silly question but I pose it anyway-do you believe in Fairies?-this quote from Declain Kiberd sort of explains why I am asking this:

" One 1916 veteran recalled, in old age, his youthful conviction that the rebellion would “put an end to the rule of the fairies in Ireland”. In this it was notably unsuccessful: during the 1920s, a young student named Samuel Beckett reported seeing a fairy-man in the New Square of Trinity College Dublin; and two decades later a Galway woman, when asked by an American anthropologist whether she really believed in the “little people”, replied with terse sophistication: “I do not, sir – but they’re there." 

Do you remember what the unicorn says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass? 'If you believe in me I'll believe in you.' I think this is the only answer I can give to a question like this.

10. When you write, do you picture somehow a potential audience or do you just write? As a playwright, do you caste the play at least by types before you write it?

The stories, by and large, come as they are.

I have drafted a full-length piece of theatre with an actress I admire in mind for the only female part. I hope to show it to her very soon.

11. Does the character of the "stage Irishman" live on still in the heavy drinking, violent, on the dole characters one finds in many contemporary Irish novels? Are some of your characters in this mode? In "The Spanish Arch Whores" we have two lads out on the town in a perhaps drugged state looking for prostitutes. In "Bloomsday Bus Driver" the bus driver takes a break to have sex with a street walker. related question (Alan, just ignore this if rude), why so many hookers in contemporary Irish short stories?

You see, the streetwalker angle (in 'Bus Driver') is your interpretation, and this is a valid interpretation. Someone else, however, may have a completely take on the scene you are referring to. Likewise for the two lads in 'Spanish Arch Whores'. I fully agree that they are on a quest. But as to what it is they are actually looking for, I can't honestly say. (Plus, I don't want to give the story away!)

As for the 'stage Irishman' you refer to, this is a label and I am not interested in labels.

12. William Butler Yeats said in "The Literary Movement"-- "“The popular poetry of England celebrates her victories, but the popular poetry of Ireland remembers only defeats and defeated persons”. I see a similarity of this to the heroes of the Philippines. American heroes were all victors, they won wars and achieved independence. The national heroes of the Philippines were almost all ultimately failures, most executed by the Spanish or American rulers. How do you think the fact Yeats is alluding too, assuming you agree, has shaped Irish literature

Yeats is writing at a certain time in history and to an extent from his own perspective and experience. Today, we are a hundred years on and there are other influences. The wonderful thing about writing is that you have an infinity of choice. This can also be a nuisance. For me, writing is something intrinsic. Heroes and villains exist everywhere at all times. They exist inside the same person.  

13- people say Shakespeare killed off the english stage as no one could follow him-did Beckett do something similar?

No. Beckett is an inspiration. Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

14. Do you think poets have a social role to play in contemporary Ireland or are they pure artists writing for themselves and a few peers?

I think all that good writing can do is bear witness - as soon as you start trying to force things creativity suffers.

15. "To creative artists may have fallen the task of explaining what no historian has fully illuminated – the reason why the English came to regard the Irish as inferior and barbarous, on the one hand, and, on the other, poetic and magical."-is this right? Kiberd, Declan (2009-05-04). Inventing Ireland (p. 646).

Good writing should help melt away barriers between people, dissolve labels - not merely explain their existence.

16. Do you think Irish Travellers should be granted the status of a distinct ethnic group and be given special rights to make up for past mistreatment? Are the Travellers to the Irish what the Irish were once to the English? I became interested in this question partially through reading the short stories of Desmond Hogan.

I think 'equal' rights is a better way of putting it than 'special' rights. And, just as with any other community, members within this community should also have ('granted' is murky) equal rights.

17. Tell us a bit about what you most miss about Ireland when you are out of the country, besides friends or family-what are you glad to be away from?

I don't miss a thing when I am out of the country. Though I do enjoy 'the return'.

18. I will be in Galway in May with my brother-best book store?

best literary reading event?

best traditional full fry breakfast?

best place for a fairly priced pint? . best fish and chips?

best place to feel I am where the great of Irish lit have been?

Kennys and Charlie Byrnes for books.

McDonaghs for Fish and Chips, but if it is busy go to Kettle around the corner and strike up a conversation with the staff member from Pakistan - he is hilarious.

Go to McCambridges for breakfast, and for lunch, and for dinner. They also have a wine cave. Go to Naughtons if it's black beer you're after.

If it's a literary event you want come for the last week in April and catch the Cuirt Festival of Literature.

19. Do you prefer e reading or traditional books?

I like collecting books.

Also, I'm an aural learner so I keep an iPod full of spoken word.

20. If you were to be given the option of living anywhere besides Ireland where would you live?

Buenos Aires.

21. If you could time travel for 30 days (and be rich and safe) where would you go and why?

I would love to have been with Achilles et al inside the Wooden Horse. Or taking that walk through the dusty street with Claudia Cardinale at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West.

22. Flash Fiction-how driven is the popularity of this form by social media like Twitter and its word limits? Do you see twitter as somehow leading to playwrights keeping conversations shorter than in years past?

I don't think the forms you refer to are driven in any way by social media. Look at the work of Eduardo Galeano, Richard Brautigan, Jamaica Kincaid...as far as 'flash fiction' - as you term it - goes, writers like these are the inspiration. Not Twitter.

23. Quick Pick Questions

a. John Synge or Beckett-?

b. Cats or dogs?

c. Galway or Dublin-which city is best for neophyte writers?

d. BBC or RTE?

e. days or nights?

It's the wrong question.

Synge AND Beckett

Days AND Nights

and so on...

24. Savage Poets, William Butler Yeats, Lord Dunsany, Lady Gregory-Posers or genuine revolutionaries?

Padraig Pearse is the person I think you're looking for here...

25. OK let us close out on this note-what is your reaction these lines from a famous Irish poet?I was born to the stink of whiskey and failure
And the scattered corpse of the real.
This is my childhood and country:
The cynical knowing smile
Plastered onto ignorance
Ideals untarnished and deadly
Because never translated to action
And everywhere
The sick glorification of failure.
Our white marble statues were draped in purple
The bars of the prison were born in our eyes
And if reality ever existed
It was a rotten tooth
That couldn't be removed.

Michael O'Loughlin

This is hard-hitting, edgy stuff and it is relevant and true and valid.

Straightaway it sends me to the wonderful McNeice poem Thalassa

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;

Let the old seaweed crack, the surge

Burgeon oblivious of the last

Embarkation of feckless men,

Let every adverse force converge-

Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;

Let each horizon tilt and lurch –

You know the worst: your wills are fickle,

Your values blurred, your hearts impure

And your past life a ruined church –

But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,

Whose record shall be noble yet;

Butting through scarps of moving marble

The narwhal dares us to be free;

By a high star our course is set,

Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

Thalassa is the Greek word for Sea.

That line at the end of the second stanza 'let your poison be your cure' captures quite a lot...

PS: In Michael's poem, I would have tried not to repeat the word failure (!)


I am very grateful to Alan McMonagle for providing us with such interesting and well considered responses. I hope to follow his career as best I can from so far away.

Mel u

Psychotic Episodes - A Collection of Short Stories by Alan McMonagle

Psychotic Episodes  - A Collection of Short Stories by Alan McMonagle (2013, 192 pages)

March 1 to March 31

Alan McMonagle
Galway

I if you are interested in participating in ISSM3, please contact me.

How I cannot I not be interested in a collection of short stories entitled Psychotic Episodes?  One of my biggest hopes  as I planned  ISSM3 was to learn more about the Irish short story and in to discover new to me writers.   If I do not move beyond the writers I have so far read for the month, I will be totally happy with the results.

Psychotic Episodes by Alan McMonagle, Galway, is a marvelously surrealistic collection of short stories with a wicked sense of humor which lives well up to its name.  The prose style is amazing and the people in them are real.


Posting on a collection of short stories presents more of a challenge, to me at least, than posting on a novel.    For me I find the best way to post on a collection of short stories, both in terms of benefiting possible readers or buyers of the collection and respecting the writer, is by  posting in some detail on a representative number of the stories and then make some general observations on the collection and offer my thoughts to prospective readers.  To those who want the bottom line first, I completely endorse this collection of short stories to any lovers of the form.  

"Looking After Little Patrick"

"We drive to the beach, find a parking space along the
promenade in front of the water, and turn to Little Patrick
to make sure he is still excited. As we assist him out of his
seat, we close the car door on his thumb. At once, I re-open
the car door, release the trapped thumb and pretend no
harm has been done. Gemma fusses over Little Patrick’s
wonderful coat, points to the waves caressing the strand
below us and, for a moment, we think we will get away
with it. However, he starts to cry. As he cries and cries, the
thumb starts to turn black.
‘It will fall off if you keep crying’, I say to him, pointing
at his scary thumb."

Gemma, and her boyfriend, the narrator of "Looking After Little Patrick" have been trying to have a child for sometime but now the doctors have told them that this not in their future. Based on how they take care of Little Patrick, the five year old son of Gemma's brother, I think we can safely say this is a good thing.   The style is totally as if nothing is wrong as we read of the nephew being given several Long Island Ice Teas (a strong cocktail), being lost at the beach and almost falling off a thirty foot sea wall. The narrator things all this is perfectly normal and we get a small glimpse of his past that that helps us understand him a bit better.   A lot of funny and interesting things go on during Little Patrick's visit.  I could not help but thing of some movies and TV shows I have seen where the little kid is the psychotic terrorizing the adults but here it is the other way around.  There is also an interestingr story line revolving around Gemma's adoration for the American president Barrack Obama and the narrator's jealousy of him.  "Looking After Little Patrick" gets the collection of to a start with a truly psychotic episode.  

"Psychotic Episode"

"A doctor once listened to my story and concluded I didn’t

like myself very much. The following week the same

doctor was found in his bedroom, dangling from a rope.

The world is a hospital someone told me he had put down in

his goodbye note – among other things."

This story, set in a mental ward or hospital is kind of a mini One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with madcaps high jinks of the end mates combined with an even crazier staff.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is a TV pilot two of the patients are putting together.   One of the patients fancies he knows what TV shows American presidents were watching during the initiation of various military actions.  "Psychotic Episodes" is a very entertaining story and a worthy title work for the collection.

"The Day My Sister Almost Fixed Me Up With a Porn Star"

"Jennifer is always trying to fix me up. ‘Hello there’, she
says to many a bemused beauty. ‘This is my only brother.
He has poor coping skills but will make a considerate
lover’.

Jennifer is the one sane sibling in an otherwise problematic family.  One sister moved to Uganda to fight poverty, without telling anyone in advance.  The other has been in a series of bad relationships and her brother, the narrator of this story, seemingly cannot get a date.  When or of you are now single have you ever had a well meaning relative always trying to find someone for you.  This is what Jennifer is constantly doing for her brother, he really wishes she would not bother.  Then one day Jennifer hits the fantasy date jackpot, she introduced him to a woman who is a porn star only she does not know that.  What happens next is a brilliant account of a very confused brother-sister he said she said set in which everyone comes out unhappy.

"Bloomsday Bus Driver"

"When I was a young lad the sun used to shine all day on
the sixteenth of June. Up it came at ten to five in the
morning and didn’t disappear until twenty past ten that
night. We lived five miles from the sea and one Bloomsday
morning my mother gave me a pound and said, ‘Off with
you now, go get a tan and figure out your life’. So I made
my way to the station, gave the pound to the bus driver,
sat in behind him and stared out at the clear blue sky"

Bloomsday is the day of the year on which Ulysses is set.  This story is nothing like what I figured it would be but as I thought about it it could have been an incident from that real day. I do not want to give away much of this plot other than to say it took four hours for the bus to make two miles.  The bus driver took a unique kind of break.  This was a very enjoyable story about psychotic bus ride.

"Untouchable"


"From the first moment she was the one. Her black shaggy
hair. Her death-is-nigh complexion. Her lost eyes and
faraway voice. She glided over ground.
He saw her every day on the bus. ‘I’ve fallen for you’, he
whispered, sinking into the seat behind her.
His world was full of order, neat arrays, reconciled. She
didn’t know her age; forgot days of the week; paid no
attention to the time of day."

Good flash fiction is hard to write and "Untouchable" at one page is an excellent role mode for other writers.  McMonagle introduces all of the elements of a classical short story in this one page. We meet two characters at a point of drama in their lives, we get to know them a bit and we feel their loneliness, we see the issues in their lives resolve and we even get a miniature sense of epiphany.     

"THE SPANISH ARCH WHORES"

"‘OK. Any sign of the whores?’ Duffy asked him, handing
over the first tenner.
‘I saw one standing right where you are now’, the drunk
replied, stuffing the money note inside his tattered coat.
‘How did you know she was a whore?’ Duffy asked,
brandishing a second tenner.
‘Because when I offered her the money the last pair of
clowns gave me she hitched her skirt and hooked her legs
behind my ears’.

‘How long ago was this?’ Duffy asked, passing over a
third tenner.
‘About fifty years ago’."


Some lads out on the town in search of whores, not the worse reason to leave the house, I guess and I like their method of verification but it seems their data is a bit old..  The story actually centers on two mates, one of them seems to spend a lot of time looking for whores but he never finds any.  The other just goes along for something to do.   One of the lads is leaving town the next day.  I found these lines totally hilarious:

"‘Tomorrow! That’s short notice. How is your mother
about all of this?’
‘The mother is delighted. She’s had enough of my aimless
ways. She’s ordered me to spend some time with a relation
somewhere in arctic Canada. Some madman who shoots
geese and dances with bears. She’s even gone and bought
me a flight ticket. But I think I’ll go to Italy’.avy 
‘Italy! I’ve always wanted to go there. Which part?’
‘I know a girl from Bologna. She has fantastic hands’.
‘Do they come with fingernails?’"

Things start to get a bit weird, did I forget to mention they are on some heavy psychotropic drugs?  I do not want to tell to much as this is a really original story.    This really is a rich very deep story which is also very entertaining.  Just remember the next time you go out looking for whores you might find more than  you bargained for.  

"Thai Food"

"She approached the two men and
without warning she kick-boxed her father to the ground
and subsequently straddled her prone victim and
proceeded to steadily pummel his chest with her little fists.
Chef egged her on. My father raised his beer in her
direction and smiled. What had Ken done to this girl to
warrant such ferocity, I wondered? What dark secrets did
those pounding little fists contain?"

"Thai Food", the last story I will talk about, very much exemplifies the common threads I have found in Irish Short Stories this month as well as the themes of McMonagle.  I will tell the outlines of the plot and then explain what I mean by this remark.  I man returns to Ireland after a very long rambling trips of several years around the world.  He visits his father, his parents are divorced.  The father tells him he wants to take him to a new Thai restaurant that the father goes to all the time.   They show up and the owner, in a suit greets them.  The father calls the man "Ken" saying he cannot say his real name and orders two daily specials and two beers.  He and his father, he  smelled the whiskey on him back at his house, begin to talk of events of the last few years but the father seems preoccupied with getting more beers for them and talking about the food.   Soon we hear a screaming from the kitchen and the chef and Ken run into the serving room with the chef in hot pursuit of Ken with a chef's knife.   The father does not even seem to notice this just observes the sauce is thin today.  He asks his son if the food seems thin to him even though he has  never been there before.  Then the scene I quote above occurs.  The father never seems to notice any of this.

Starting with common areas to the stories in this collection we have a psychotic episode happen but no body takes note of it as they are too preoccupied with banalities.  We have two people talking totally at cross purposes with no communication at all.  We have the sense that random violence can destroy our ordered world at any time and that much of the things that go on around us are lost to us.  We have the heavy use of alcohol.  We have one person in the story who seems sort of sane and one disconnected.  We have the son who tried to escape Ireland.  We have a fragmented family.  

One of the common themes in the short stories I have read this month is that of the weak or missing Irish father.  Declan Kiberd traces this in part to the legacy of the church which usurped the spiritual authority of the father and colonialism which in effect under cut the masculinity of the country and forced the Irish into finding ways to survive from a position of weakness and subservience.  In all of the Q and A Sessions with writers I have done this month I have asked if Declan Kiberd is right when he says this is the dominant theme of modern Irish literature.  No one has said flat out yes but most say there is something to this.  From this weakness flows the heavy drinking in the stories, wives as something you go to the pubs to avoid, mothers to be worshiped and for sex you look to whores.  These are all in "Thai Food".  It is also a story of exile and return, about the changes in Ireland in recent years, about the repudiation of Irish culture in the preference for Thai food, about the inability to communicate without drinking.  Is the father in this story weak, hard to tell but he was missing in his son's life for years due to divorce and then the son's travels.  A missing father can come from the strength to work off shore for years alone not just from drunken weakness.  In part missing fathers are a consequence of colonialism also and in the last few years we can see this  in the collapse of the Irish economy.  Broadly speaking this was, it seems, brought on my acts of failure and greed by high level Irish men, often in the pay or directed by outsiders, who made terrible decisions which enriched them but impoverished the country.  When it is time to pay the price, the fathers of the country suggest all must share the pain.  To the people who caused this it may mean selling one of your hunting lodges in the south of France, to others it means cutting your medication back to every other day.  

There are thirteen other wonderful stories in Psychotic Episodes, each one very different in plot from the others.  The stories are very entertaining, very funny as long as you are a bit off yourself and who is not now days, they build worlds in just a few pages.  You can see the marvelous prose style of Alan McMonagle in the passages I have quoted.   

I endorse this story to any an all lovers of the form and I look forward to reading more work by the author.

Author Bio (from his webpage)

Alan McMonagle is a poet, playwright and short fiction writer living in Galway, Ireland. He holds an MA in Writing from National University of Ireland, Galway. He has received awards for his work from the Professional Artists’ Retreat in Yaddo (New York), the Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), the Banff Centre for Creativity (Canada) and the Arts Council of Ireland.

He has contributed stories to many journals in Ireland and North America including The Adirondack Review, The Valparaiso Fiction Review, Natural Bridge, Grain, Prairie Fire, Southword and The Stinging Fly. 

Liar Liar, his first collection of stories published byWordsonthestreet appeared in 2008 and was longlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The title story from his second collection, Psychotic Episodes, (due from Arlen House in April 2013) was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize.

You can learn more about his work on his webpage.

He has kindly agreed to do a Q and A session so look for that soon.

Mel u