Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (2007, 181 pages, 8 short stories)

Last month in a book store in Killarney I acquired two collections of short stories  that have secured my belief that the best days of the Irish short story are still  to come.  One of the books was Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry.  The other is a work I have just completed, Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan.  (Last year I read and posted on her debut collection, Antarctica.)

I was deeply moved by the stories in Walk the Blue Fields.  I will reread, I hope, some of them numerous times.  Keegan (1968, County Wicklow, Ireland) has received many honors and intense praise online and in print reviews.   Her work, in my opinion, is clearly in the tradition of Dubliners and the stories of John McGhern.  They are very rooted in Ireland mostly in the Rural west.  The people in the stories are often deeply alone.  These are sad stories of people some how left out, often centering on people who have faced terrible losses, isolates.   There is a deep wisdom in these stories but in a way it is a wisdom that will harm, not help, those who can understand the pain in these works.  I think it maybe that only partially damaged people can fully relate to these stories.  I know that may not make sense to most people and perhaps you are better of that way.  These stories are superb works of art.  In the last story, "Night of the Quicken Trees" I felt my ability to understand this story was well enhanced by my recent visit, in the company of my brother Max u,  to the west of Ireland.  

I hope to read more of her stories as time goes on.  

Mel u

"Men and Women" by Claire Keegan

"Men and Women" by Claire Keegan (1999, 16 pages)

March 1 to March 31
Year III

Claire Keegan

County Wicklow

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story, maybe on a story that means a lot to you or a writer you admire, or any related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.  

Last year during Irish Short Story Month Year Two I posted on six short stories in Claire Keegan's highly regarded collection of stories, Antarctica.   I had hoped to post this year on her second collection, Walk Through Blue Fields but that will not happen.   I wanted to include her work in the event and I noticed one of the stories in the collection, "Men and Women" is also included in an anthology I am drawing from this year, Scealta:  Short Stories by Irish Women edited by Rebecca O'Connor.  I read the story two  times this week and really liked it.   I think it deals very well with the general themes of the emotional reticence of the Irish, the relationship between the sexes and the differences in the ways girls and boys are raised.   It shows beautifully how one family in rural Ireland works.

The story is told in the first person by a young woman, in her late teens.   She has a brother who is considered "the brains" of the family so he is exempt from farm chores so he can study, her mother, and her father.   Her father suffers from arthritis so the daughter goes with him when he goes out.   The father buys and sells things from people in the area.   In one scene I really enjoyed visualizing she tells us that when her father buys a few sheep he puts them in the back seat of the car and she has to keep them under control.  We see the girl growing up and she does resent, who would not, her brother's privileged status and she wonders how her father can manage to dance with women not his wife at parties when he cannot get out of the car to open the gate at their house.  At the local dances men twice her age ask her to dance.  People tend to marry late in Rural Ireland and we see these "old bachelors" at the dances.   

There is a great scene at the end where the wife at last  asserts herself and demands a measure of respect.   It was a very visual close and I loved it.

Author Data

Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford, 

Mel u

Antarctica by Claire Keegan

Antarctica by Claire Keegan (1999, 201 pages, a collection of 16 short stories)

Irish Short Stories Week Year Two

March 11 to July 1

Event Resources

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts by Participants

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week.   All of the resources you need to participate, including links to 1000s of stories,  is in the Event Resources.

April Prize for a Participant- I am happy to announce that a randomly selected participant in ISSW2 will receive a copy of the Frank O'Connor Prize listed work, Somewhere in Minnesota through the kindness of the author. Orfhlaith Foyle.  If you are a participant in the event please email me to be in the drawing for this wonderful collection of short stories.

Antarctica is Claire Keegan's first collection of short stories.  Keegan was born in 1968 in County Wicklow.   She has an MA in creative writing.  She has won numerous prizes for her short stories.  She lives in rural Ireland and is a very highly regarded teacher at short story workshops.   


There are sixteen short stories in the collection, some of which have been previously published in literary journals.   I think the best way to post on a collection of short stories is through looking at the individual short stories in the collection.  I will talk about six of the stories, all of which were just great works.  


"Antarctica"  is the title story in the collection.    It is really an amazing story.   It is about a woman who decides she wants to find out what it would be like to have sex with a man other than her husband so she calmly and coldly makes up an excuse to be out of the house for the night (business takes her away) and picks up a man beneath her in social status, goes back to his house and spends the night with him.  The tone of the story is dead pan still but you know something terrible is going to happen to this woman and you are for sure right.  I will not any more as it is such a strong ending.  I will say that male readers of this story whose wives have cheated on them might relish the ending a bit to much.  It is a kind of precautionary tale for the straying wife.


"Love in the Tall Grass" is another story about marital infidelity.   This is a story about a single woman, Cordelia, who has a very long affair with a married Doctor.  The doctor has a strong sexual fixation on the woman and she is deeply in love with him, or as much as her damaged soul allows her to be.  Cordelia and the doctor can spend only stolen time together, often having sex among the tall grasses.  Circumstances force the doctor to tell her they must split up but Cordelia extracts a time and place for a meet ten years from now.  The language of the story is wonderful.   Cordelia begins a terrible downward spiral and completely cuts her self from all human contact.  She never goes outside.  We do not know how but she has the money to pay to have everything she needs left at her door.  When the date comes there is a really wicked double deception. "Love in the Tall Grass" is a great story.

"Ride If You Dare" is also about a woman cheating on her husband.  We do seem to have a trend here!  It helps in appreciating this story set in the coastal regions of Mississippi in the United States to know that Keegan spent some time in Louisiana, right next to Mississippi.  I know enough about this region of America (here in the Philippines we call it Bubba Gump land) to appreciate the little details that make this story such a pleasure to read.  I really liked it a lot when I saw the mention of Tobassco sauce!   The story is about a man who placed an ad in a newspaper "woman wanted" and the married very attractive well dressed woman who responded to his ad.  They meet for the first time in a seafront restaurant up on stills.  I really wanted some fried shrimp with hush puppies to go with this story.   Keegan puts an awful lot in a few pages and this was a great story.   Keegan leaves out the right things so we have to decide for ourselves why the woman is ready to cheat on her husband with a random stranger.  This is a great story.


"Sisters" is the longest story in Antarctica.   Betty and Louise are two seemingly very different sisters..   Louise married pretty well and went of to the big city to live and have some kids.   Betty stayed behind to take care of their widowed father and when he died she stayed on and took care of the farm.   The father always showed more affection for Louise, pretty much taking Betty for granted.  Betty gave up the chance for a husband and family, she was after all the plain sister.    Ever year Betty, her husband and their kids come for a visit.   This year Louise says her husband cannot come do to work issues.   As the story unfolds we see a life time of being taken advantage off come unraveled.   This story is real a small masterwork of subdued emotion.   


"Passport Soup" almost hurts to read as it is so close to the bone.   It is about a couple whose daughter is missing, seemingly having been lured away by a stranger.   The wife blames the husband for making her vulnerable to the words of a stranger by filling her head with fairy tales, a direct stab at much of Irish culture. The wife is out every night looking for their daughter, the husband stays home hoping she will come back.   The story brilliantly portrays the horrible consequences this has for the relationship of the couple.   It is hard to see how it could survive the horrible ending but the man thinks it might.


"Close to the Waters Edge" is another very good story.   Like all the others it is about, in part, a less than perfect marriage.  It also spans two generations.   It is set in the USA, starting in Tennessee and ending next to the Atlantic Ocean in Florida with a side trip to Harvard along the way, a lot of ground to cover in eight pages.   It is about two generations of women, both married to brutal uncaring men who they stay with because it is somehow best for them, or so they feel.  In the first generation the family are struggling pig farmers, by the next generation the daughter of the first woman  is married to a wealthy man and living in a condo on the water in Florida.  There is a very interesting tie in concerning the ocean between the generations.   The top Harvard student son is gay and we see how  his step- father consistently bullies him in ways that range from subtle to idiotic.




The other ten stories are all very good.   Since Keegan published this collection she has developed into one of the top short story writers of the world.  

From my summery post on Irish Short Story Week Year One in 2011

Ds  of   Third Story Window    posted on a collection of short stories by Claire Keegan,  Walk the Blue Fields.   I want to quote from her post as what she says is very powerful:  "It has been difficult to think about leprechauns and pots of gold, shamrocks, and fairy circles this week; hard to find something engrossing enough to take one away from thoughts of global disaster. But I did. It is a small volume that I brought back from Ireland last fall--books being my favorite souvenirs--a collection of short stories by a young woman who has won nearly every major Irish literary prize, and whose first book was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year.     Her name is Claire Keegan and I had never heard of her.   Now, I will not forget it her."    (DS is referring to the terrible Tsunami that hit Japan and elsewhere in March 2011)

Maybe I will be lucky enough to post on Walk Through Blue Fields in 2013 for Irish Short Story Week Year Three.

Please share your experiences with Claire Keegan with us.

"Please considering joining us"-Ruprecht

Mel u

"Foster" by Claire Keegan

"Foster" by Claire Keegan (2010, 12 pages)

Resources for the Week

Day Five

The Irish Short Story in 21th Century

Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan (1968-County Wichlou, Ireland), along with Anne Enright,  has a very good claim to be considered one of the future stars of the Irish short story.   One reason I think the Irish short story is such a rich field is that the bar has been set very high.    Keegan has won a large number of prestigious Irish literary awards.    She attended college in the USA at Loyola University in New Orleans then returned home.   She has taught at universities and offers creative writing workshops.   Se has published two collection of short stories.

"Foster' (published in The New Yorker February 2010) won the David Byrnes Irish Writing Award for 2009.   This award, with a 25,000 pound prize, is sponsored by the Irish Times.  (In 2008 there were 1100 entries, Anne Enright won).   

"Foster" is a beautifully written story.   It is set in rural Ireland.    As I have

seen before in the stories this week,  Keegan makes sure she sets the story in an exact  place in Ireland using very Irish place names.   The word order in the speech of people in the stories I have read often seems to be somehow "out of order".    This gives the conversations a special quality I really like.

"Foster" is about  a girl from a family that has fallen difficult times.   They cope with it by dropping their daughter off with a wealthier relative and his wife, for an indefinite period.   Sadly they never seem to tell the girl what the plans are and the father just leaves her without a word of good bye or an idea when he will be back for her.    Her host family are wonderful caring people that I slowly grew to like, as did the girl.   All of the emotions are very under played.    There is a lot in these 12 pages about family ties, about growing up, and about life in rural Ireland.    The end is very interesting and brings up a lot of ethical issues around parenting.  I recommend it without reservations.   I am not ready yet to say   if I like her story or those I read by Enright best. I hope to read more stories by both writers this year.

"Hello, Claire, Welcome to my party, and who
let that cat in looks like a shape shifter to me"
Carmilla
si

You can read "Foster" online here.


If you want to participate in Irish Short Story  Week just read and post on any short story by an Irish author and leave me a comment.   At the end of the week I will do a master post with all the links.   


Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestion you may have.   

"Him I am new here, you will see more
of me"-Rupreket

 Mel u