Maria C. McCarthy A Question and Answer Session with the Author of As Long as it Takes

My post on "As Long As It Takes", the beautiful lead story of the collection. 

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2014/03/long-as-it-takes-by-maria-c-mccarthy.html

Poet, writer of short fiction and memoir, performer, social networker, workshop leader.

Maria’s first poetry collection, strange fruits is published by Cultured Llama in association with WordAid with all profits going to Macmillan Cancer Support.

Her first collection of short stories As Long as it Takes, about first and second-generation Irish women living in England, is forthcoming in February 2014.

Writing as Maria Bradley, she was a regular columnist on BBC Radio 4′s Home Truths.

Maria has arranged themed events at libraries in the Medway towns, Canterbury and Swale, and at The Avenue Theatre, Sittingbourne, featuring her own work and that of other local writers and musicians. She has also taken part in events at the University of Kent, at the Medway Fringe Festival 2006, and at Foyles Bookshop in London.

She leads creative writing workshops in her writing room – a converted shed at the end of her garden – and has also taught workshops on short fiction at the Hazlitt Arts Centre, Maidstone, for Save As Writers, Canterbury, and has led poetry workshops for libraries in the Medway and Swale areas of Kent.

Maria has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. She was winner of the Save As Prose Awards 2011, having also won the 2009 Award, and gained second place in Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year 2010.

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Maria finishes five sentences for Canterbury Laureate Sarah Salway - featuring a photo of her writing shed

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MARIA’S BOOKS:

As Long as it Takes (due for publication February 2014)

Unexplored Territory (published November 2012)

strange fruits (published July 2011)

A.  Please tell us a bit about your experience leading work shops?

I don't lead workshops very often, but when I do the biggest challenge is that I want to include everything. I over-prepare, spending ten times as long as the workshop lasts. The rewards are the writing that comes from surprising places and people. I gave some objects to a group as writing prompts. One person had a small plastic tub with bags of spices inside. She chose to write about the lid of the tub. It was a wonderful piece, quite beautiful.

B.   does an anti Irish attitude persist in England.

I think it does, but a lot less so than when I was growing up, when we from Irish families were associated with the acts of the IRA. My brother was beaten up by his English friends on the night that Mountbatten died. This was behind the story 'Cold Salt Water' in my collection. I can identify with how Muslims feel in England, when they are associated with fundamentalists. It's similar to how the Irish were treated in the '70s.

C.  Tell us a bit about the foundation that your book sales help support please.

My first book, strange fruits,  was a fundraiser for Macmillan Cancer Support, which supports people with cancer and their families. The book is in memory of my friend Karen McAndrew, who died just 4 weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Macmillan were very supportive to her and her family, and I used their website a great deal to get information. Macmillan nurses work in the community and in hospitals, and they helped Karen and her family in her final days. The final story of As Long as it Takes features Macmillan nurses. The story, 'Combing out the Tangles' is based on my final visit to Karen, when I combed her hair. Such an intimate thing to do, and all I could do for her at that stage.

D.  Are you willing to generalize a bit and compare and contrast the Irish versus the English?

Ooh, goodness. I grew up in England in an Irish family. I suppose my memories are of Irish people as willing to have a party at the drop of the hat, and English people being a bit more reserved. And I have to say, in the circles my family moved in, there was a tremendous amount of drinking by the men (not so much by the women), which I didn't see in the families of my English schoolfriends. I do think there is a sadness in a lot of Irish people, in spite of a seeming outgoing nature. But all these sound like generalisations, and are based on memories rather than current day. And talking - the Irish can talk!

questions for Irish Short Story Month Year 4

These questions are designed to get responders talking.  They are asked out of a deep respect, they are not a quiz.  Feel free to ignore questions you do not wish to answer.  The more you answer, the  more valuable the session will be. Say as much as you like.  

A. 

A.  what is your reaction to this ?

I do feel that a lack of respect, a challenging of authority, is something that has been passed down to me in my genes. I remember my mother marching up to the school to speak to the headmisstress about my brother having been locked in a cupboard as a punishment. This was in primary school. My sister, who was perhaps only 8 years old herself, walked out of school and ran home to tell Mum what had happened. A brave thing to do, and born out of that lack of respect for authority. 

B.I love this quote.  Is Edna O'Brien onto a fundamental insight about the Irish.?

I think she is on to something. It does make me think of the landscape of County Clare where my mother comes from. 

1. Declan Kiberd in his book, Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation, said the

dominant theme of Modern Irish is that of the weak or missing father.  Do you think Kiberd is right? How does this impact your work,if it does.

It totally impacts on my work. My father worked on building sites and he and his mates travelled to wherever the work was, often leaving before I woke and returning after I had gone to bed. He also spent a lot of time in the pub, so I felt I didn't know him, growing up. The child in my story 'A Tea Party' longs for her father's attention, and to see his donkey jacket hanging in the hall. The world of As Long as it Takes is matriarchal, but governed by an often absent patriarchy. The matriarch of the family, Maura Flaherty, keeps everything going, but is dependent on whether her husband Jack gives her the rent money, or whether it "disappears on the back of a horse".

It was the search for my father, seven years after his death, that led to me writing the Mitchelstown sequence of poems in strange fruits and fed some of the stories in As Long as it Takes. I went to his home town, Mitchelstown in County Cork, to find out why he had been left there as a baby by his parents. He had never talked about his childhood and rarely went back after he moved to England.

2.  how and when did you begin to write? 

I began to write after becoming ill, when I had just turned forty. I had to give up my job in 1999. I was later diagnosed with Chronic Fatigues Syndrome, which I still have. I was mourning for my life, how drastically it had changed, and I started to write poetry at first, coming to fiction later. it was a way of dealing with grief, and later became a new love, replacing many of the things I had lost.

3.   Who are some of your favorite contemporary short story writers.  What classic writers do you find your self drawn to reread.  If a neophyte short story writer were to ask you who to read, what might you suggest?

I like Claire Keegan, Lorrie Moore, Vanessa Gebbie - there's an international selection for you! In recent years I've enjoyed collections by Gerard Donovan and Alexsandr Hemon. Classic writers - Joyce's short stories, John McGahern, Katherine Mansfield. I would suggest Katherine Mansfield to a new short story writer. 

4.  Frank  O'Connor in The Lonely Voice:  A Study of the Short Story said short stories seem to be about marginalized people, the lonely, those with with little voice in society.   Do you think he is on to something illuminating about the format?  Why is there so much loneliness in the Irish short story?

I've heard that quote and thought it was William Trevor. Though, come to think of it, his quote was about short stories being about the little people, those who would be overlooked as heroes. Both are true, i feel. I think the loneliness comes from the isolation of those in small towns, rural communities, and in a country where there is so much poor weather that keeps people apart, indoors. The migration on Irish people has led to a lot of loneliness in the countries they migrated to. You can be surrounded by people and still be lonely. I think there is loneliness in all short stories, a sense of the outsider looking in.

      The best book by far on the short story?

5.  I sometimes wonder why such a disproportionate amount of the regarded as great literature of the world is written in the colder temperate zones rather than in the tropics.   How big a factor do you think the Irish Weather is in shaping the literary output of its writers.?   I cannot imagine The Brothers Karamazov being written on tropical island, for example. 

Oh, I appear to have answered this in the previous Q! More time indoors, more isolation, the effect of rain on the psyche...

7. When you write, do you picture and audience or do you just write?  

I never picture an audience; I just write. When I edit, my thoughts are more with the readers. I need to know that the readers are oriented in the story, that I have put on the page what is in my imagination without telling them too much. But I couldn't write to order. I'd be rubbish at writing for a women's magazine or if told to write horror, for instance.

9.  Assuming this applies to you, how do you get past creative "dry spells", periods when you have a hard time coming up with ideas or when things seem futile? 

I take the view of keep making marks on the pages. I had a dry spell after finishing As Long as it Takes, and got through it by writing about things close to home, mainly things I could see from my writing shed, which overlooks an orchard. The poems felt slight and worthless at the time, but they emerged into a sequence, some of which have been published. The one that I felt the slightest of all has been accepted for Poetry Salzburg Review.

10. What are the last three novels you read?  Last three movies?  do you have any favorite TV shows?  

I'm not reading much fiction at present. The early arrival of my first grandchild last November turned my reading routines upside down, and I've got into reading mostly non-fiction and poetry. So i can't actually remember the last novel I read. Last three movies I saw at the cinema: Inside Llewyn Davis, 12 Years a Slave and Alpha Papa. 12 Years a Slave was brilliant if gruelling. The way that McQueen lingers on the horror - you want to look away but can't. Came out of the cinema unable to speak. TV shows - I do love watching old episodes of ER. I find a blood and guts hospital drama strangely relaxing. I am loving The Last Leg on Channel 4 and the US series Girls is really smart and funny.

11. Have you attended creative writing workshops and if you have share your experiences a bit please.  

I took a Cert than an MA in creative writing and have also been a part of workshopping groups, such as Medway Mermaids women's writing group. I learned a tremendous amount on the courses, but they were only the beginning of my learning and practice as a writer. Workshops - at their best they can be supportive and helpfully critical. At their worst, they can destroy a beginner writer's confidence. I had a malicious workshopper in my MA group for 2 years. Why the tutor didn't deal with it I do not know. I have lost faith in workshopping, I have to say, except in a trusted group. Even then, it's good to get the opinion of someone you don't know after a while, someone with a different perspective. I am not a member of a writers' group now and it doesn't appeal to me anymore. 

12. Make up a question and answer it please.

What are your favourite stories about encounters with the rich and famous? 

I once made a cup of coffee for Eric Clapton. I had a summer job as a receptionist for a PA and lighting company, and he popped by with his road crew. The roadies acted as if they were more important than he was. He was quite charming, I also met Slade when I was social secretary at Thames Polytechnic in1980 and they came to play. The hall was packed. We had to get extra security. Noddy Holder came out of the green room at the end of the night, much the worse for wear, and said to me, 'Someone's pinched me fags. It's not so much the fags I'm worried about, it's the principle of the thing.' 

I also see Bob Geldof a lot, as he lives in Faversham, a few miles a way from where I live. I don't get excited about it anymore, as I see him so often. He is a lot shorter than he appears on TV. 

13.  Not long ago I was sent several very hostile messages from Irish writers demanding to know why I had posted on the works of other writers and not them.  Some suggested I had been influenced  by some sort of shadowy group to ignore their work. I was informed there is a small elite group who decides who gets reviewed, published or receives grants and it was also suggested they had sent me negative feedback on writers I should ignore.  What in the Irish literary scene is behind this?  Is there anything like an "Irish Literary Mafia"?

Ha ha! That's hilarious. I don't really know the irish literary scene, living in England as I do. I do know it seems hard to get small publishers' books reviewed in the national press in England, and having connections probably does help. But then, you don't know me from Adam and have asked me to do this Q&A. I'd say you're squeaky clean.

14.  Tell us a bit about your non-academic non literary work experience please

  Tell us something about your educational background, please. ,

I went to a Catholic primary school in Surrey, which was very mixed in terms of race and culture. Lots of Irish children, plus Italians, Polish. It was quite rich in many ways. I then went on to a girls' grammar school, which was very posh and mainly white English girls went there. It was a culture shock, as I'd mixed so much with Irish children and families, even though we lived in the heart of Surrey. I did a first degree at Thames Polytechnic, being the first in my family to go on to higher education. I worked as a library assistant after graduating with a non-spectacular lower second (too many interesting things going on to study hard). Marriage and children came early, so I didn't get into work properly until my late twenties, when I started a career in the charity sector, working mainly with volunteering schemes around disability. My last full-time job was managing an advocacy scheme for people with mental health problems. Then I got ill and haven't worked full-time since 1999.

15.  Quick Pick Questions

A.  tablets or laptops?

I love my MacBook laptop, and I don't have a tablet. If I had one, I might love that too.

B.  E readers or traditional books?

Traditional books, definitely. Though Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was rather heavy on the wrists. i'd have appreciated an e-reader for that one.

C.  Synge or Beckett?

To my shame, I am familiar with neither. Blame an English education that largely ignored Irish writers as well as Irish history.

D.  Cats or dogs?

Cats. I have a 19 year old tortoiseshell called Biscuit. 

E.  best city to inspire a writer- Paris, London, Dublin, or?  

I get my inspiration at home, as I don't travel well, but I do find that I write a lot when I am away,

F.  Would you rather witness opening night for Waiting for Godot, King Lear, Playboy of the Western World or Ubo Roi?

I'm not that keen on theatre. I've hardly been since all those Shakespeare productions I was forced to see at school.

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.

The short answer is yes.

17.   Death, natural and otherwise is a central factor in the Irish short story and it seems to me to play a bigger factor in the Irish short story than other cultures-can you talk about this a bit, please .  

The Irish do seem to have a bit of thing about death. I remember my mum and an Irish friend would take a walk around a graveyard as entertainment. And it's something that I like to do as well. John McGahern's stories are haunted by the death and absence of his mother. My own have been accused of being very melancholy, but as the reviewer mentioned my work in the same sentence as that of William Trevor, this didn't upset me too much. Happiness doesn't make compelling fiction, in my opinion.

18.     How important is social media in the development of the career of writers?  Do you have your own web page and if so why?  Do you think it is good business savvy to post free samples of your work online?  

It has become increasingly important. I use Facebook and Twitter a lot. They are great for connecting with other writers as well as readers. Writers work on their own a lot; it's lonely. I asked the poet Helen Ivory how Facebook affected her writing, as she posts all the time (and I often interact with her). She said it's like a virtual office to her. She has her water cooler moments on Facebook. Incidentally, having known Helen Ivory and her poet husband Martin Figura on Facebook for so long, I got to meet them in person recently. A lovely long lunch at their home. So virtual relationships can become real ones.

I do have a website www.medwaymaria.co.uk

Posting samples of work online is good to an extent. i do worry for those writers who post their work all the time. They are giving away their work for free. Why would someone buy one of their books if they can read their work for nothing? And sharing early drafts is not such a good idea. I only post completed work, and usually when it has already been published by an e-zine, which gives it some validation.

19. recently Guiness sponsored a creative writing program and set up a grant system for writers and artist.  A number of my Irish Facebook friends said they would repudiate a grant from Guiness and art festivals and programs should refuse their sponsorship. This was in part because of the perceived terrible social cost of alcoholism on Irish families.  It was also stated that Guiness was trying to get people to see drinking as associated with creativity.   Would you refuse a grant from Guiness?  Are  their sponsorship efforts insidious? When I facetiously suggested I would take on the burden of these malicious grants, I was taken to task as an outsider who needs to mind his own business.

Interesting one. I think I would take a malicious grant, too! But I would have to confess to not liking Guinness, in which case they might not give me the grant after all. I do have an ambivalence about the drink/creativity myth. I have seen alcoholism rife in Irish men, particularly, and it's not funny or pretty.

End

My great thank to Maria for taking the time to provide us with such interesting and informative responses.

I hope to post on her full collection in April.

 

"Villa Marta" by Clare Boylan (from Concerning Virgins, 1996)

Clare Boylan was an Irish author, journalist, and critic for print and broadcast media.  She wrote a number of novels including Holy Pictures, Home Rule, and Room for a Single Lady. She is probably best know for her 2003 novel, Emma, a completion of an unfinished novel by Charlotte Bronte. She also published three collections of her short stories.  She died at age 58 of ovarian cancer.  

Last year during ISSM3 I posted on a very good short story by Clare Boylan, "The Little Madonnas".  I was happy to see Anne Enright had included another of her stories, "Villa Marta" in her anthology The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. 

The story centers on two teenage girls living in a port city in Italy.   They dream of one day finding a man that will take them to America.  They imagine themselves in a lovely house.  American Navy ships often dock there.  The girls meet a couple of predatory sailors.   The girls are not pure innocents and they plot with each other about getting a nice meal from the sailors before going back to their hotel.  Things don't go well for the girls.   

I enjoyed reading this story.  I hope it is not another year until I read another of her stories.

An Interview with Geraldine Mills, ( author of Hellkite, Lick the Lizard, and The Weight of Feathers) by Valerie Sirr

Whenever you can sit in on a conversation between two very talented writers, it is a privilege.  I have been following the literary careers of both Valerie Sirr and Geraldine Mills for some years now.  I have posted on four of Sirr's superb short stories and for previous ISSM events she has very kindly contributed very edifying guest posts.  She and I share an admiration for the work of Geraldine Mills. I am very honored that she has allowed me to share this interview for Irish Short Story Month Year Four.

Here is the official biography of Valerie Sirr

Valerie Sirr is a writer from Dublin. She began writing after graduating with her Diploma in Advanced Computer Programming from Trinity College, Dublin. She became interested in psychology and studied at University College, Dublin, for her B.A. hons. Psychology degree, going on to study at London’s Institute of Psychiatry. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, and has published and broadcast many short stories both in Ireland and Britain with stories currently under consideration in the US. She received the Hennessy New Irish Writer Award and the Hennessy Award for Emerging Fiction and was awarded two Arts Council of Ireland literature bursaries. She also won the William Allingham, Elizabeth Newsom and Nora Fahy short story awards. Her radio play was shortlisted for RTE radio’s PJ O Connor award. She teaches creative writing and literature appreciation, part-time, and has facilitated writing workshops for Dublin Simon Community and other groups in the community.  Her debut collection of short stories will be published in 2014.

You can read some of Valarie's short works of fiction on her webpage.  

 I admire writers with the self-confidence and generosity to make some of their work available to the reading public.

I greatly look forward to reading her debut collection.  

http://www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com 

I’ve admired Geraldine Mill’s work for a long time now. I first came across her writing when her story ‘Lick of the Lizard’ won the millennium Hennessy New Irish writer award. Her winning story became the title story for her debut collection of short fiction published by Arlen House in 2005. I reviewed that collection here.

Hellkite, Geraldine’s third short fiction collection published recently by Arlen House, is a powerful and original work that explores the goodness of men, and the cruelty, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hellish, of women to men. There’s a lively, imaginative playfulness in these stories and the abandoning wife in the opening story is further developed in the final story, which allows an exploration of the humanity of the hellkite and frames the collection beautifully. Below, in this review/interview, we explore the many strengths of Geraldine’s collection. 

Valerie Sirr: The idea of a collection of hellkites for a book of short fiction is wonderfully inventive. How did the idea come to you? Did you come across the word somewhere, an image? Was it an emerging theme in your work?

Geraldine Mills: The collection didn’t start out like that at all. There was never a moment when I said I was going to write a book about cruel people or about men who have been cruelly treated by women. Like most writers, it is not the way I work. I go with the gut instinct of what is chipping away at my imagination; what will not give me peace until I start to give it some attention; until the image begins to hold.

So, for me, yes, it is the image, a picture that lodges in my subconscious and grows there until it demands to be fleshed out. The starting point of the collection was ‘The Centre of a Small Hell’ which was broadcast on RTÉ when it was shortlisted for the Francis MacManus competition. The idea for that story came after a friend of mine showed me a hunting table belonging to her father who had just died. That piece of furniture immediately grabbed my attention and as with the most rewarding parts of writing, the characters Bernard and his wife Margaret became flesh. It was then up to me to search out the words that might adequately paint their lives on the page.  Deciding to bookend the collection with Margaret’s death scene came about much later in the process.

I find with each collection that I am writing blindly, not seeing much before me. I am well into it before I see a pattern emerging and it was the same case with this one.  After I finished ‘Frost Heave’ and ‘Every Piece of Ivory a Dead Elephant’ I found that I was telling the stories very much from the man’s point of view, not knowing why that was. Only as the collection got more depth was I able to see a pattern emerging which was ‘the goodness of men.’

As I looked for more stories I was able to see that this theme resonated even in the very short story ‘The Devil’s Dye’. In this piece of flash fiction, Eliza’s father is the one who gives her the courage to go on despite the hardship of her young life. The final story ‘Feeding the Wolf of Lies’ was also an important one to include in it as there is an attempt at seeking atonement which comes too late. I was able to salvage the title Hellkite from an unsuccessful poem I had written a few years earlier. It is what we writers do, salvage, steal, unearth.

VS: There is a wide range of styles in the collection from classical realism in some instances to the comical surrealism of Fionn MacCumhaill appearing in a Dublin supermarket (‘Drinking his Strength Back’) and the Angel Gabriel turning up on the moonlit trampoline of an Irish garden (‘The Best Man for the Job’) to the darker Kafkaesque absurdity of a hopeless man’s metamorphosis into a pig (‘Foraging’). Even your traditional stories often read like tales, for example ‘Centre of a Small Hell’ – like an old Irish tale, ‘This Street with Looking-Glass Eyes’ with its echoes of Hansel and Gretel, ‘The Call’, with that vivid swan imagery, ‘Once Bitten’ – an unnamed man hovers between past and present love. Have you ever made a conscious decision to move away from social realism?

GM: Never. I go where all writers go; I sniff out the story and like a blood hound follow it until I can root it out of its covert. I am certainly attracted to the surreal and the power of story. I also believe it is important to write what gives me the greatest fun and contains the greatest primordial energy. Maybe it says something about my need for new things, not to stay in the one spot too long or I will atrophy.

Every story a writer starts is like starting from the beginning again so I am always working in the dark; I never know what I am doing until it is almost done. I don’t set out with a plan. After getting the image, I run with it until it takes on its own life.  There may be a battle, there will be a battle until the story comes or it doesn’t. The easiest ones are the ones where I hear the voice of my character in my head and they carry the story for me, such as ‘The Best man for the Job’. With this Angel Gabriel story, I was lying awake late one night in Cape Cod suffering from jet lag and I saw the image of the archangel swinging back and forth in the darkness. I transferred him to the trampoline at a later date so Jimmy could join him on it.

The Hansel and Gretel story was written one blistering afternoon in Cordoba when it was too hot for me to go sightseeing. My husband was going to visit a castle and I asked him to bring me back great stories. My own request had given me a new starting point, a first line. I immediately grabbed it and went through the revolving door of the hotel to its coolness and started writing. I had the first draft written by the time he came back. A wonderful exhibition I had seen by the photographer, Helen Levitt, in Madrid the week before was still there in the back of my head and that informed the looking glass scene at the end. Mad or what!

VS: Whether your stories are social realism with contemporary references to austerity measures and redundant men, or experimental stories like those already mentioned, they seem to me to be deeply felt. Is ‘truth’ in fiction something that matters to you?

GM:  In the preface to Creatures of the Earth, John McGahern wrote: Among its many obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not suffer such constraint and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens. The god of life is accident. Fiction has to be true to a central idea or vision of life.

For me the story has to feel true; it has to have authenticity. Even though nearly all my fiction has little or no personal truth in it, when I write I subvert most details to satisfy the narrative I am writing. I have to believe it. I have to see it all happening as if I have lived it. I have to see Bernard taking the sledgehammer to the hunting table, I have to see the archangel swinging his legs on the trampoline, or Fionn MacCumhaill eating spag bol.

Hemingway also had something to say about it: Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as if it would truly be.

It has to ring true for me so the reader will be carried on that truth.  Otherwise it doesn’t see the light of day. The stories that I discard don’t have that ring of authenticity.

VS: Your poet is very much in evidence from your unusual word choices – ‘haem’, ‘grallocked’, ‘pangolin’, ‘latchico’ (which I haven’t heard in years), ‘gilly’, ‘grackled’; your striking symbolism, imagery, pathetic fallacy; your ear for language rhythms. The opening to ‘Drinking His Strength Back’ reminds me of Ginsberg’s ‘A Supermarket in California’. Do you ever use a story image as an inspiration for a poem or vice versa?

GM: As you know, the only tools a writer has are the words and they have to be the right ones. The short story is as tight as poetry and for me the joy is in getting the right word, getting the lines to flow with the rhythm of a poem; to make it the very best it can be. I have certainly started off something as a poem that ended up as a short story and vice versa. ‘Thwarting Zeus’ in my last short story collection was a poem in my very first collection ( Unearthing your Own, Bradshaw Books, 2001) which was inspired by my friend and fellow writer Eileen Casey’s daughter sitting beside me when she was barely able to talk, looking up at me with her beautiful eyes and telling me that I smelled of swans. Out of the mouths of babes! Such an imaginative line had to be given as much space as possible and warranted both poem and story as I wanted to explore it to its limit.

I have always loved the short story genre and never planned to be a poet but when my children were very young often the only way I could get down an idea was to distil it into a poem. I was fortunate enough to get the attention of Bradshaw Books after winning their poetry competition and they went on to publish my first two collections. After that Arlen House approached me and invited me to submit my short fiction. Arlen House has published my last five collections so I have been extremely lucky in the dedication of these two independent publishers.

Writing poetry makes you a stickler for ensuring that you chose the right word and that you don’t waffle. That the image is strong enough to carry the narrative; that you are giving it all the attention it needs.

VS: There is a primal earthiness in your writing. Nature, animals and the animal in human nature permeate this collection (‘Centre of a Small Hell’, ‘Frost Heave’, ‘The Devil’s Dye’, ‘Apidea’ and your final story, ‘Feeding the Wolf of Lies’ – the poignant bird imagery and the gecko that briefly echoes the lizard from your first book). In ‘Every Piece of Ivory a Dead Elephant’, once again the absence of animal connection breaks a marriage. What writers or poets might have inspired you in this regard? Do you live close to nature, or did you as a child?

GM: There is something very heartening about a reader getting it; discovering all the nuances and the symbols hidden within the text. You have certainly given the collection a very close reading and you have picked up on all the little symbols that are there. Yes, I grew up in the country in county Galway in what was the country then. Behind our house was a small hazel wood. When I think back to that time, I realise that those woods reared us. We were not so much feral as hunter-gathers that scavenged briars and branches throughout the growing season. We were out in them at all times, our mother only calling us in when it was time for bed. In fact in the summer we  didn’t even go in for meals but stood at the edge of the wood and shouted into her to bring us out a piece of bread which she dutifully did. We lit fires in the woods, roasted gooseberries on them, cracked nuts with stones, bruised our mouths with blackberry juice.

We were allowed to run wild, to live in moss and ferns. Just to smell moss now brings me back to that time of wildness. I spent a lot of time playing with snails, we made them race across the front step, climbed into walls and across the tops of gates. It was what we knew best and I felt totally at home among the trees and the birds. Moving to Dublin in the 1970s was great for 20 years but the lack of space and trees had me crossing the Shannon in 1992 where I lived in a mobile home every summer without electricity or running water until we finally built our own house and I moved back permanently in 1995. Here the scent of moss is never very far away. So, yes it’s a big part of me.

Writers who inspire me are another day’s work. I suppose everything we read informs us in one way or another in what way we want to write or not, as the case may be. I keep going back to Eduardo Galleano’s The Book of Embracesgiven to me by friend and short story writer, Alan McMonagle. It’s a book that blends poetry and parable, history and autobiography. I particularly like the surreal drawings attached to the text. I could write stories on those alone.

VS: I know you’re interested in art from your previous cover choices and you have an intriguing painting ‘Death in Florence’ by Pauline Bewick on your cover. You couldn’t have found a more apt image for your book. I love the ‘Alma Fetish’ story behind Bewick’s inspiration for the painting. Could you tell us a bit about it and how you came upon it?

GM: I was thrilled to be able to use the painting by such an esteemed artist. As you say it really sums up the collection. Arlen House is known for the beautiful books it publishes especially Bewick: The Seven Ages and Kelly Reads Bewick. They are collectors’ items at this stage and I am a fortunate to have copies of them. With Hellkite I was very clear that it had to be a very strong marriage between the text and the image. In choosing a new cover, I seek out new art work; go to exhibitions to see if I can find an appropriate image. It was the same with this one and when I went through Bewick’s art and discovered Death of Florence I knew it was the one. Nothing else came close to it in terms of how it captured the essence of the stories and what I wanted to portray.  It was much later that I saw it was part of the opera inspired by her work and the life of Alma Mahler.

VS: Hanif Kureishi recently commented in a Guardian article that most of his graduate students did not know how to tell a story. No matter what style of story I’ve read in Hellkite, there is always the sense of being in the hands of a writer who has a keen awareness of the power of a well constructed narrative. There is great dramatic tension in your disturbing title story, among others. Some of your stories, though they are mostly modern rural Irish voices, have speech idioms and phrases ‘as Gaeilge’ and local lore that remind me of the traditional seanchaí passion for the art of storytelling. For any writing students who might read this interview, what would your advice be about storytelling, or how important is it to you?

GM: I have a card on my computer desk which asks me three questions when I sit down to write a story. What story do I want to tell? Who do I want to tell it? How do I want to tell it? That’s what it comes down to. If I can get these elements working together then I feel I am onto something. I keep going back to those questions if I find myself in a quandary. The story telling is a major part of the process. I want to tell it to someone and tell it so that he/she can see it happening before his or her eyes. That is why it has to work on every level. It doesn’t have to be a big story. In fact, the genre is built on a something small that brings about an awareness of change in the character and the reader. The story has to hook me in order for it to be continued on in the imagination of the reader. It’s not enough to have a good story if the writing doesn’t stand up and equally no good if you have well constructed sentences and no plot. The alchemy is in the melding of the two. Everything has to click into place –  character, point of view, conflict, ending – like the tumblers on a vault door for the door to open. ‘What if’  is the carrot or stick that keeps me  moving the story forward.

VS: Your short story collections and poetry have been taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. You teach in NUI Galway. Do you find that mentoring inspires you to write, or do you put your own work on hold. while teaching?

GM: There is a balancing act to be achieved when you write and teach. It can be very time-consuming working with other people’s short stories but very rewarding when you see where the story needs salvaging and you can bring the story to another level.  Most of what I have learned about writing is by the hard graft of getting it wrong myself, understanding where it has gone wrong and learning how to put it right. Reading the masters in the genre is another way to see how it is done, but you really only learn by doing.

The advantage of mentoring is that you become sharper at editing because you are watching all the time for dud notes, for punctuation that affects the rhythm, a dubious point of view, a story that starts on page two. It sharpens my own writing and I see it as a plus both in terms of  what it brings to my writing and being able to earn money doing something I love. It also makes me write. How can I, in all reality, be critiquing someone’s work if I am not writing myself? I have to be up-to-date with new styles and not be a Luddite, stuck in the past. It also makes me much more disciplined. I will often do my own work first, knowing that the teaching will have to get done at a later stage. If I do it the other way around my own writing will be side-tracked into some other chore.

VS: You’ll be reading at the next Cúirt Festival in Galway (Cúirt Literary Brunch). Your Hellkite stories have appeared in the prestigious Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6 among other places and have been broadcast on RTE. Do you enjoy the promotion, performing side of writing?

GM: For me the writing is the driving force. Recently, I came across a quote from the songwriter David Crosby where he was talking about song-writing. He said ‘If you don’t have a song, all the production in the world is just polishing a turd.’ I am inclined to agree with him. The work has to stand up to scrutiny, to endure. The greatest fulfilment for me is the finishing of a story to the best of my ability. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than someone coming up to me after a reading and telling me that they like my work. To touch even one person with what you have written is a great achievement I believe.

I am delighted to be reading at Cúirt with Geraldine Mitchell and Edward O’ Dwyer.  The promotion side of things is not my strong point but I am always happy to accept an invitation such as this and to be reading in my own home town. American audiences have been hugely responsive to my work so it is always a great boost to read in Connecticut or Seattle. I also love to read at smaller festivals around the country because that is where you can pick out the pulse of people’s interest in literature.

A short story reading is a bit more difficult than a poetry reading. If you choose to read the wrong short story you could lose your listener soon after the first line. With poetry you can better gauge your audience and change tack if the first few poems don’t keep their attention. A short story doesn’t have that same opportunity and you make sure you chose a story better suited to the ear than the page so that listeners can see the story unfolding before their eyes.

I still believe that the work should be the yard stick but it is a different world now and it is important that in this social-media age to let the world out there know of new work and promote it at every opportunity. So Valerie, I appreciate very much you taking the time to structure these very interesting questions. I really enjoyed answering them and thank you for posting them on your blog.

VS: Thank you too, Geraldine, and congrats on another impressive collection of work. Best of luck and Beir bua!

 

Geraldine Mills

 Geraldine Mills Biographical Note:

Geraldine Mills is a poet and short fiction writer. She has had two collections of poetry published by Bradshaw Books, Unearthing your Own (2001) and Toil the Dark Harvest (2004)

Arlen House has published her short story collections Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers (2007) for which she was awarded an Arts Council Bursary.   She is a recipient of a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her third poetry collection An Urgency of Stars published by Arlen House in 2010.

She has won numerous awards for her fiction, including the OKI Award, the Moore Medallion and the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Short Story Competition.  She has been a finalist in the William Trevor Short Story Competition and has been shortlisted six times for the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. She was the Millennium winner of the Hennessy/Tribune Emerging Fiction Award and the overall winner of the New Irish Writer Award for her story ‘Lick of the Lizard’.

In 2011 she toured the United States where she launched a poetry collaboration with New England poet, Lisa C. Taylor, titled ‘The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House 2011) and presented the prestigious Gerson Reading at the University of Connecticut. Her short story collections have been taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University.

She is a mentor with NUI Galway and is an online tutor in the short story with Creative Writing Ink. Her recently launched Hellkite (Arlen House) is available at Kennys Bookshop, Galway.   Geraldine’s website

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I offer my great thanks to both writers for allowing me to share this wonderful conversation with my readers.