I have already illustrated my love for the collection of stories Mother America, and the zeal is only going to get worse as I publish the feature interview on writing.ie, and now the full interview here.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir was good enough to answer my fanatical questions, and has some really interesting things to say about her new collection, available from Amazon at the end of June. I was interested in how she managed to compile a collection that ranged from reimaginings of Ted Hughes and Frida Kahlo to analyses of contemporary rural Irish life, and so started off by asking her about her technique.
1. What is your writing routine? Is it a daily process, or is it a burst of work once every few months? Do you set rigorous demands of yourself when you sit down to write?
I write in the mornings when my kids are at school/crèche. My daughter is in a crèche three mornings a week (five mornings from September – yay!) so that’s when I write. I also get up early at the weekend when everyone’s in bed. I write all the time: on the train, bus, in the car, in bed. It’s a constant thing.
I don’t make rigorous demands on myself as regards word counts etc. – I achieve more with modest goals. The aim is to just write something, anything.
2. How much time do you spend in preparation for writing a short story? Take for instance a story like “Cri de Coeur” — did you spend a lot of time researching Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s relationship before sitting down to write? Did you unearth anything that surprised you about them?
I read a biography of Sylvia. And one of Assia. Just out of interest, I wasn’t planning to write about them. Then I just felt like exploring their lives from Assia’s point of view as it seemed to be the lesser known voice in the whole tragedy. I was surprised they had all spent time in Ireland, separately and together – that was the kick-off point for the story.
3. What is your technique for writing a short story? Do you write from the beginning with an end in mind, or do you write the end first and work backwards? Is there much variety (in how you write a short story) from one short story to the next?
I never know how a story will end as I begin it. I write to tell stories to myself so I don’t need to know the ending. I start with a first line and a character, and a feeling or mood, and work from there.
Inspirations can be diverse – an image or a word or a person can inspire a story, so they come at you differently.
4. How long did it take to compile Mother America? Was it a longer or shorter process than your previous short story collections?
It’s about three years worth of work. My last collection came out in 2009.
5. When you were putting these short stories together for Mother America, what did you have in mind for the collection? What were the themes/concerns/ideas on your mind?
I don’t sit down to write with themes in mind but, like all writers, things possess and obsess me over the course of writing a book. I am always interested in the body and in mothers and children and, in this book, these things came to the fore. I divorced and remarried and in the period these stories were written, so that turns up. I also visited Rome for the first time and got to know Sligo’s Strandhill a little. Things that happen to you, and places you visit, turn up in the work.
6. The influence of poetry can be seen in many of your stories, through emphasis on detail and brevity. How do you decide what subject matter would more appropriately suit a poem or a short story?
I always find this a difficult question to answer. Maybe there is no good answer. Something just feels like a poem as opposed to a story. Having said that, all of my writing is concerned with the body and families and women’s place in the world.
7. I noticed that in some of your stories you describe smells very effectively. In stories such as “From Jesus to the Moon” (set in Rome) and “When The Hearse Goes By” (set in Paris) your renditions of smells are one of the major modes of description. How important do you think sensual descriptions are to a short story?
They’re very important and I realise how important when it’s pointed out to me. I have a writing friend in Austria, Sylvia Petter, who does studies on the olfactory in short stories. Her interest has sparked mine and now it is something I am very aware of. But all the senses should be used. The reader loves a sensory experience.
8. You use male narrators in many of the short stories in Mother America. How easy or difficult do you find using a male or female voice?
I like to use both. It’s fun to write as a man. I love writing the type of unaware man that embodies, say, Clyde in the story ‘Queen of Tattoo’. He’s a horror and doesn’t realise it.
9. Many of these stories are set in the past. In a story such as “Scullion”, set in an Irish estate house in the late 19th/early 20th century, what prompted you to write about a scullery maid? Do you find your creative capacities are greater in reimagining the past or the present?
I’m interested in every type of woman and I imagine the life of a maid back then was pretty joyless and tough. It’s interesting to re-imagine other time periods. Slightly tricky too as you want to get things right but not douse the story in historical fact. I love historical fiction as much as that set in contemporary times; both are great to occupy as a writer.
10. I noticed there was some cross-referencing within the collection — In “Peach”, for example, you created a new adjective to describe a tablecloth — “Kahlo-bright” — and the next story after “Peach” is “The Egg Pyramid”, a story about Frida Kahlo and her relationship with Diego Rivera. In putting this collection together, was the order of the stories very important to you?
It was. When it comes to ordering the stories I always put stories I am fond of first and last. Then I make out a chart, listing POV, sex of the main character/narrator, setting etc. I try to mix it up in terms of all of that, while also trying to achieve a change in tone from story to story. It’s a balancing act that I hope came off.
11. There are some instances in Mother America where you make full use of the grotesque. In “Peach”, the cat Chicago kills Droopy the budgie, and Dominic picks him up and flops his head back and forth, observing “He really is droopy now”. In “From Jesus to the Moon”, there’s a vivid description of a girl getting run over. Is there any influence from Flannery O’Connor in these stories? More importantly, how do you decide when to shock the reader and when to be neutral?
I’m a Flannery fan and would count her as an influence in general. I like rough, difficult stories but I don’t set out to write them, sometimes they just happen.
I’m never thinking about the reader as I write but a story makes its own demands – it is better not to avoid the raw and the disturbing. I don’t like the completely grotesque but why avoid the hard things in life in fiction? They exist. The incident with Dominic and Droopy is something that actually happened to me.
12. Why did you choose Mother America as the title? Do you feel that the eponymous short story best represents the collection as a whole? Why?
I feel it’s a strong title and writer friends have confirmed that, which pleases me. I don’t think that story represents the whole book, per se – that’s a lot to ask of any story – but I was fixated on the title for a long time. My last collection Nude (Salt, 2009) had a unifying title because that best suited that book – it is about art and lovers and each story has a nude in it.
13. There are at least two stories in the collection (“Moongazer” and “From Jesus to the Moon”) that conclude with the female narrator looking to the moon for help or forgiveness. Do you feel there is a strong connection — literal or symbolic — between women and the moon, and why?
Yes, I do. I love the moon. Plath loved the moon. I am absolutely sure the moon affects my mood and it is such a beautiful thing to look at. It lends itself well to art. I get possessed by symbols from time to time: rivers, the moon, peacocks, hares. It pleases me and helps in the writing.
14. In the stories “Easter Snow” and “Triangle Boy”, both set in Manhattan, you compare the narrator’s experience (of Ireland) to their perception of the city: “I am from a quieter place — a country of villages, where the odd tractor makes the biggest noise, and the buildings do not try to suck the breath out of the sky.” How much is this informed by your own background? Do you share some of your characters’ thoughts on the city’s claustrophobic quality?
I love New York and when I come home from it my ears ring with the silence of where I live (‘a quieter place … where the odd tractor makes the biggest noise’) after the din of the city. I’m from Dublin (a rural part of it) but I went to school and college in the city. I prefer cities but you can get a lot of writing done by living in a quiet place.
15. In some of the stories in Mother America, you deal with themes of fertility and barrenness in women. How important are these to your characters? Do you find these issues central to female characters especially, and why? Do you feel there is a greater significance to these themes?
Fertility issues have affected my own life (pregnancy loss, fertility treatments) so having been consumed by these things for years they inevitably made their way into my writing. The ability (or decision) to have or not have children is huge for women, central to their lives. It can make great stories.
16. In stories such as “Mother America”, “When the Hearse Goes By”, and “From Jesus to the Moon”, your characters are either very reliant on, or discontented with, religion and faith. Do you feel this an important theme for contemporary Irish stories, and why?
Again, I don’t like to dwell on themes or consider what writers should or should not write (who is anyone to dictate what we “should” write about?) but religion and its collapse in Ireland is huge. I grew up in a very Catholic household. It has all fallen away now and that is curious. I still love churches and Catholic iconography and it’s hard to abandon a large childhood influence, so I write about it, to tease it out.
17. Mother America is an international collection — the stories jump from Ireland to Rome to Mexico to Paris to Manhattan with ease. Have you visited all these places? How did you find them? Are there other places you want to set your stories in?
I’ve been to all the places bar Mexico. I love writing about places I have been – I fall madly in love with most places I visit. Travel is the big bonus of being a writer. I’m just back from a short story festival in Croatia. In a couple of weeks I’m going to a short story conference in Arkansas. Everywhere I go I’m on high alert and furiously jotting things down and taking photos. It energises me to go away. Then I come back to my quiet East Galway town and re-imagine it all in stories and poems.
There are other places I would like to set stories but I would like to visit them, to get a proper feel – Russia, for example. The Antipodes.
18. There is a vast amount of importance invested in place in your stories. Do you feel a strong sense of place is essential to your stories and why?
Place is one of the hallmarks of Irish writing, isn’t it? We’re obsessed with place and land and ownership and regionality. I love the part of Dublin I am from. I am not so crazy about the place I live in now, but circumstances have me here and it works from the POV of getting work done – there are few distractions.
19. In your acknowledgements, you offered míle buíochas to “those from whom I borrowed and begged stories and words”. How involved were others (and their stories) in your work for Mother America?
My parents have a great store of language so I steal their phrases all the time – my novel YOU (New Island, 2010), set in Dublin, is awash with them. My dear friend Marcella inspired the story ‘By Ballytrasna’ with something she told me. I have nicked words from writers Joyce Carol Oates and Valerie Trueblood – they don’t own the words themselves but I have plucked them from their work knowing well I was doing it. My cousin through marriage, Cathleen, told me about the Triangle factory fire in New York. When I was writing ‘Spelunker’ my writer friend Alan McMonagle mentioned the cave paintings at Lascaux to me and that got woven into the story. So, obliquely or intentionally, other people contribute to things I write. And I love that and am grateful for it.
20. Who would you count among your greatest influences?
Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Flannery O’Connor, Lorrie Moore, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, the Brontës.
21. What’s next? Another novel, another collection of short stories, another collection of poetry, or something entirely different?
All of the above! I have another novel completed (set in Scotland and Ireland). I have started another (historical). I have more stories written and more poems. As for ‘something entirely different’, who knows? Maybe I will finally secure that elusive, wonderful agent that I so want ☺
Mother America will be available to buy here and here by 30th June. Buy it!
