A mother land

Welcome back to Snow Like Thought, Nuala. I’ve built a Nuala annex on the book case that doubles as a bunk where you’re welcome to pog any time you like; it’s always lovely to have you.

‘Pog’  - what a great word! I’m wondering now if you imported it to New Zealand, or if you found it there? Thanks for hosting me today, Rachel.

I want to begin this interview with a general observation about interviews. There’s a tendency with writers to often quote another (more famous) writer as a means of borrowing authority for the substance of their answers in interviews. For example, Lloyd Jones said, when asked about narrative[1], ‘I like Samuel Beckett’s quote when asked about James Joyce’s work. “He (Joyce) isn’t writing about something. He’s writing something,” Beckett explained, which gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say here.’ Which gets to the stone of the peach; I must mind my tongue! So, I thought I would use your answers to questions in other interviews as the basis for my own questions.

In the Connacht Tribune you said you had your “Best Holiday” in “New York. I felt right at home. I just loved everything about it: the seediness, the culture, the people, the physicality of it.” I wondered if you could talk a little about your experiences in New York and whether they fed into any of the stories in your fourth short story collection Mother America? 

New York is definitely an influence on this book. I always longed to go there but only managed my first trip five years ago. I’ve been back a few times since – I got married there in 2010. Like every place I go, I am on high alert in NY: notebook and camera at the ready as I walk the streets or visit museums. NY is so vast and varied there is always something wonderful to see.

I got the inspiration for the story ‘Triangle Boy’ from my cousin-through-marriage Cathleen, who lives in NY. She told me about the Triangle factory fire in 1911. The story ‘My Name is William Clongallen’ concerns a Brooklyn man of Irish origin. Brooklyn is different to Manhattan and I love its villagey feel, so that turns up. The story ‘Letters’ was partially inspired by the non-fiction of Maeve Brennan, an Irish writer who made her home in NY and wrote for The New Yorker. So, through reading and by being there, I absorb things that I later use. Much like everywhere I go.

Do you think writing fiction set in a specific place is a form of synaesthesia?

For me it is. I get transported to a place when I write or read about it. When I read Janet Frame, I am in New Zealand. When I read Chekhov, I am in Russia. I don’t need to have set foot in either of their home-places to feel it, smell it etc. I hope that I can recreate that at times in my fiction, that people feel they are in rural Limerick, say, when they read the Irish-set part of ‘My Name is William Clongallen’; or that Paris is alive to them when they read ‘Poisson d’Avril’ or ‘Spelunker’. Reading should be a sensory experience.

Many of the stories in Mother America are about exile, of people leaving Ireland to go to America, stories of mothers, and of sons, but I was thinking about the title and it reminded me of Edna O’Brien’s Memoir Mother Ireland, and I thought about one of your stories in your last short fiction collection, Nude, ‘Madonna Irlanda’. You gave an interview about Nude to The Short Review. “Once I cottoned on to the motif of the nude in some of the stories I was writing, there were stories that had to be ditched because they didn't fit with the title theme.” In Authortrek you talked about “inspirations” over “influences”, mentioning Edna O’Brien  You also mentioned you worked on The Juno Charm and Nude simultaneously but as a reader I find Mother America a stronger companion to the Juno Charm than Nude, even wondering if you had plans for a Mother Ireland collection. 

I read Mother Ireland (ages ago) and found some of it quite fanciful about Ireland. Edna O’Brien has lived most of her life in London, so she has that emigrant thing of knowing an Ireland that no longer exists, except in her memories. If I did write a Mother Ireland it would be very different to hers but, similar also – I went to convent schools, I had a country upbringing (despite being from Dublin), and, like her, I was a sensitive child. But my life is too pedestrian for memoir, so I won’t be going there. Maybe the next fifty years will prove very exciting and I’ll change my mind!

Mother Ireland begins with O’ Brien leaving Ireland but there are writers such as Frank McCourt whose parents had migrated to America but returned to “Mother Ireland” – for better or worse – and your stories span the periods their fictions detail and some similar terrain. The stories in Mother America in particular struck me as asserting themselves in the Irish canon, compared to Nude which had a distinctly international feel I thought. How do you think your fiction fits into the literary tradition in Ireland? How important is a national perspective for a writer? Can you imagine, for example, ever being simply an international writer or would you want to be known as such, without your Irish heritage being a factor? I suppose what I’m really asking is, do you think your fiction demonstrates a migration of the imagination so that, in essence, you are always leaving Ireland, are always a migrant, and if so, how do you think this affects your writing?

I guess, like my contemporaries, I am more global in outlook, less insular. My generation saw huge changes in Ireland: the legalisation of contraception, the collapse of Catholicism, the feminist movement. All of which please me – I would not have found it easy to be born in the 1940s or 50s in Ireland. Life would have been too restrictive for me. So my fiction is postmodern and feminist in outlook, but also Irish.

When you are Irish, your bones are steeped in your nationality – it dictates language and attitude – so it’s inevitable for me, as a writer, to identify with my Irishness. But I also look to Europe, America and the world for freshness, for difference.

There is a particular brand of rural Irish fiction that appeals to me more as I grow older; I used to be annoyed by it as it didn’t represent my life. I also love contemporary work that deals with Ireland’s new issues: immigration, divorce, drugs, loss of religion etc. There is more than one Ireland.

I don’t think I am ‘always leaving Ireland’ in my work, but I like to write about those who leave and return, to see what that throws up for them. There is a lot of sentimentality about Ireland and it’s better to clear that away and look at the country and its people, warts and all, I feel.

Lloyd Jones has said it is “the immigrant’s task to make themselves new.” I think this also applies to fiction writers. In Mother America you manage to re-remember an Ireland of the past and at the same time you have positioned yourself at the helm of a very inspirational creative development in contemporary Irish fiction. I think the only way I can describe it is when I think about the first telecommunications cables being laid from Ireland to Newfoundland – which gave rise for speedy two way communication – and you’ve done the present equivalent with Mother America. In your interview with Prairie Schooner you talked a little about how inspirational you find American fiction, I’m sure the same sentiment will come back across the Atlantic about Mother America.

Thanks, Rachel. I hope so. I find the Americans to be superlative short story writers: Anthony Doerr, Ron Rash, Caitlin Horrocks, Flannery O’Connor, Wells Tower, Manuel Munoz. All brilliant and inspirational.

What is next for you, Nuala and where can we buy Mother America?

I have a novel completed, set in Dublin and the Scottish Highlands, for which I am seeking a good agent. And I’m writing more stories and starting out trepidatiously on another novel. So, busy busy.

You can buy Mother America from The Book Depository with free delivery, worldwide.

Thanks for having me by, Rachel. On Monday 16^th July my virtual tour takes me to writer Declan Burke’s blog in Dublin. I hope some of your readers will join me there.

Thanks so much for stopping by, Nuala. Very best of luck with your agent search and finishing your latest novel, and for your Frank O’Connor International Prize for Short Stories listing - congratulations!

BIO

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a short story writer, novelist and poet, born in Dublin in 1970 and living in Galway. Her fourth short story collection Mother Americawas published this month by New Island. Nuala’s story ‘Peach’, in the Winter 2011 issue of Prairie Schooner, won the Jane Geske Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. www.nualanichonchuir.com

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http://www.facebook.com/MotherAmerica
www.nualanichonchuir.com
http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com/

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[1] Finlay MacDonald, Words Chosen Carefully; New Zealand Writers in Discussion, 2010. P 18

Nude Not Naked Tour

Nuala Ní Chonchúir's here. She's just behind that screen, preparing for her portrait - I'm painting her nude.

You go on and make yourself at home there, Nuala!

While Nuala settles in, here's a little biographical note, just incase you haven't been following my blog or have had your brain misplaced in a peat bog for the last goodness knows how long, and you're now wondering, "who is this fabled Nuala"?

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in County Galway, Ireland. Her third short fiction collection Nude will be published by Salt in September 2009. She has poems and an essay in The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets, edited by Joan McBreen (Salmon, 2009). Nuala was chosen by The Irish Times as a writer to watch in 2009; she has won many short fiction prizes including the Cúirt New Writing Prize, RTÉ radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She was recently shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature and she was one of four winners of the Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection competition. Her pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car will be published by Templar in November. Website: http://www.nualanichonchuir.com/

Looks like we're almost ready to get started. I've got my brushes, my paints, tea and biscuits.

Now, don't be alarmed by the size of my easel!
Portrait of this artist looking very sleep deprived and in need of make-up, photoshop, or editing out altogether, and staring oddly just a little bit too close to the camera. I have such lovely eyebrows - what a shame they're hiding.

Regular followers may remember I offered a little challenge for one of you to come up with a question for Nuala, in exchange for a little blog showcasing. And the lucky winner was (is), Lori Tiron-Pandit. Lori is here now - lovely hand shaking ladies - to ask Nuala her question first. So let's begin.

Lori: "You write both poetry and fiction with success. What is the process of choosing to manifest a thought as either a poem or a short story?"

Nuala: Thanks for your question, Lori. It’s a hard one to answer but I’ll do my best. In a sense there is no conscious choice; something occurs to me and I know by the shape or feel of it whether it’s story or poem material.

Story is more complex because there are characters, scene-setting, the ‘what-happens’ – which is akin to plot – etc etc to think about. I don’t start out with a plan or an idea as such, usually a story starts as a meeting of character, situation and atmosphere in my head (very difficult to describe! John Banville called it a ‘mood’ once). That all launches forward from an opening sentence that may have been swirling in my brain for weeks. My fiction is generally based on made-up events that resemble the truth, though sometimes I’ll use a real life event from the media or history to base my fiction on. There’s a story in Nude called ‘An Amarna Princess Up North’ which is my imagined version of a real-life forger’s life; I changed the names and got inside his head.

My poetry then is normally either very personal – based on my life and events in it. Or it’ll be a comment on other women’s lives and things they’ve gone through like domestic violence or anorexia; things I haven’t experienced but I feel the need to highlight. I also write historical narrative poems based on women I admire, like Joan of Arc. Actually I wrote a story about a different aspect of her life too which is on the net at Indieoma. http://indieoma.com/

Rachel: There is the feeling, as the reader of Nude, of not being a reader at all, in the sense that we are not spectators but are brought to take part in the events; almost as if we can intervene at any moment, or that a character may pose a question to us; and I notice that you have used (with success, more so in ‘Unmothered’, I think) that uncommonest of narrative forms, second person narration, and I wondered if this, and your employment of first person narration, was a deliberate means to make the reader feel that the stories are not escapes at all, but to make the reader feel the same need to escape as the characters?

Nuala: I’m glad that you were so lost in the stories that you felt a part of them, that the characters seemed real. It’s so hard to be objective about your own work and you never know if it’s believable. I don’t write with anything in mind other than telling a story to myself, so I never wonder what readers will think as I write. I only wonder about people getting it after it’s been published.

As for 1st or 2nd person being deliberate choices, they aren’t; I just find 1st person the best way to tell stories. I have difficulties with 3rd person because I feel too far away from what’s happening; it feels clunky and frequently doesn’t lift off the page for me. I love creating a voice and getting inside the mind of a character.

Unusual it may be, but I find 2nd person oddly comfortable. I have to stop myself from using it often because I seem to naturally go there when I start writing. I think it’s a very Irish way to tell a story – sort of intimate but distant too.

One of my favourite books of all-time is Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place, so maybe I gleaned a love of 2nd person from that. The novel I have written is in the 2nd person and some of the publishers who have read it (and rejected it!) have had a problem with that voice. But if it’s good enough for Edna O’Brien and Jay McInerney...

Rachel: The title of your collection of short fiction is, obviously, Nude, and nudes do feature, in some way, in each of the stories within this collection, but I was struck by the notion of reality as the character being undressed, and that your fiction was, in essence, peeling back the filth, the commonplace, the ordinariness of real life to reveal the art of life, and I wondered how much you consider yourself to be undressing reality, as opposed to clothing it with art; which leads me to ask how much do you consider yourself to have chosen characters who are overlooked?

Nuala: I think so much of peoples’ lives are about secrets – most people won’t share the detritus of their minds with others for fear of being exposed. One of the great things about fiction is, as you so wonderfully put it, the undressing of those secrets and the sneak-peak into privacy and personal truths. We all have an image of ourselves and other people’s image of us is often quite different and in stories, as a writer, you get to expose and explore people’s foibles and weirdnesses. I love that. I also love fiction that rings true and I hope that no matter how weird the situation I present in a story, that there is a dose of reality and truth in it.

As a reader, I am not keen on reading about ordinary, hum-drum lives and so as a writer, I prefer to write about odd-balls and loners – they have more interesting internal lives. Frank O’Connor famously wrote about the short story being peopled by the lonely and I would agree with that. Most of the characters in Nude are yearning for something or someone to make them feel less alone.

Thank you, Nuala, for such detailed and insightful answers, and for choosing to stop off here in New Zealand first. No peeking, I've got a few finishing touches to make first.

Thanks a million Rachel for hosting me at Snow Like Thought on my Nude not Naked Tour and for very interesting questions. I’m starting and ending my virtual tour in the Antipodes – the last stop on the 3rd November is at Australian author Sylvia Petter’s blog, Merc’s World: http://mercsworld.blogspot.com/

Next week, on the 8th of September, I’ll be at fellow Salt authors Tania Hershman’s blog TaniaWrites: http://titaniawrites.blogspot.com/

My thanks, also, to Lori, whose blog I will be showcasing soon.

Finally, Nuala, thank you for posing. I think we're all done here now, would you like to see your portrait?

Sorry, did you think I was painting Nuala......? Oh, I meant her book of short fiction, Nude! Her Nude! Words, eh? Slippery as paint.

Re:collection

I found a stack of sketches, all near identical, each figure having taken mere moments to translate. I like the messiness of the whole thing. All of it. Everything. Life. Don't tidy me; don't edit me into conformity and I can be deliciously succinct.

Give me an old body any day

with breasts comfy as cats, skin

that wants to touch itself.

Young bodies are regular, angular or thin,

each appendage trying to leap,

perpendicular, as far away from its host; each

bump a fleshy beast as obstructive,

as appealing, as short-shelved as a peach.

Not long to go now until Nuala Ní Chonchúir touches down, on the first of September, to talk about her ravishing book of short fiction, Nude. And now I want to congratulate her on her genius for choosing a title that would make headlines this week for being in a tug of war between two celebrities - what great publicity! - And she isn't even married to Henry DeTamble!

I'm still averaging a short story a day, too. Got that collection collected! Now, what to do with it?

It could be mist

When I read one of the stories in Nude I thought of this pastel sketch and smiled. I like it because the colours are soft, much as pastels and bottoms should be, I think.

It's time for another nude: not the Nude, that's coming up on the first of September - I'm priming my canvas as I type (I should add ambidextrousness to my list of talents, except that it's made up and I'm being daft) - this nude is ten years old and doesn't look a day over fifty!

She's lovely and blurry and fuzzled at the edges: like mist - a pastel mist.

All this getting ready to interview Nuala Ní Chonchúir has been extremely beneficial to my creativity. I've written five short stories over the last seven days ( I can't call it a week because it didn't begin on a Monday, nor end on Sunday), and they're all going in my almost complete collection. I like to imagine I have a publishing deal and all the trimmings, there's no point being a pessimist is there? Or a pastelmist. Perhaps I am ever so slightly losing the plot, but it will all come out in the wash. Speaking of...I'd better get these brushes washed!

Worn art

I chose this pastel sketch because I gave the sitter a big body and a leetle head, and because the style and colours make me think of some of Gauguin's work.

I've been having a bit of a clear out, preparing my studio for when Nuala Ní Chonchúir visits on September 1st, to start her virtual book tour, here!

I'm going to be interviewing her about her latest book of short fiction, Nude. I have my copy, which I read whilst pushing the buggy to school, and I cannot praise it enough.

You may remember I was asked to think up three questions to ask Nuala. Me being the generous soul that I am, offered one of you lucky bloggers a chance to ask a question yourselves. Well, I can say I have chosen the question (it was an easy decision, those of you who are regulars will know why) and I am very happy to announce Lori Tiron-Pandit as the other lucky questioner. Hurrah for Lori!

As her prize, Lori will have her blog showcased on this blog after the interview which should hopefully benefit her with some extra blogger traffic.

So watch this space for more updates and, possibly, more nudes - it's amazing what tattered un-masters you find down the far recesses of a dusty old portfolio! I might start painting nudes again - any offers for sitters?

A world in my here

Disclaimer: the following is not a review of the Time Travellers Wife, nor is it a criticism of that book or it's author. It is merely a playful creative exercise.

Odysseus: I'm a modern day myth, part Icarus, part Cupid, part Orpheus, who, despite drinking as many cups of expensive coffee as I can fit into one narrative, and popping all the pills I can think of (which have or have not been invented), still cannot manage to stay in one place long enough to have more than a fight, rod someone, or to groom my future wife. This latter point is worth some discussion but as no one else is mentioning it I won't either, suffice to say, it's weird. I am a time traveller but I am caught within the confines of my own lifetime - a la Dr Sam Beckett. Unlike Beckett, however, I am playing out a different hypothetical time travel paradigm. One which has me land my naked tall dark and handsome butt at critical moments of mine or my wife's past, but rarely, in the future. I can take nothing that is not a part of me with me, except sometimes dirt, which I cannot explain, so I don't. It's all about being. There's something destinctly metaphysical about me that I cannot explain beyond quoting Donne.

Penelope: I have known Odysseus all my life, almost, from when I was six at least - any younger would have been weird. He is as familiar to me as perfectly cooked tuna at just the perfect shade of tuna pink. He has been visiting me in the meadow by my parents' house, Knossos. I am little more than a symbol myself but know I am a goddess to Odysseus because I often display the labrys. I don't like to talk about deep and meaningful things because Odysseus is the patriarch. I am the Frida Kahlo to his Diego, the Euridice to his Orpheus.

Odysseus: Penelope likes to believe we are living in a Minoan society but my values are strictly Achaean. I like to kick butt until I meet Penelope in my real time, when I mix the delights of butt kicking with the feminine delights of slipping between Laura Ashley sheets. I know they're Laura Ashley because I am cultured, obviously because I work at the Newberry library, and not Starbucks, where my persistent nakedness, coffee guzzling and product placement might have been more at home.

Odysseus: I am roaming around barefoot (and the rest - that is to say I am nude again, not to be confused with Nude the collection of short fiction by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, available to buy now from Salt) in some part of my neighbourhood, for maximum confusion and the threat of bumping into people I will know or meet in my future. I never can seem to time travel to anywhere else in America. I am an anti-hero striving towards redemption. Despite my time travelling gimmick with bells on (and one 'l' in traveling) I am still fallible and cannot shake off this mortal coil, no matter how many drugs I take. I am, in the words of Teddy Thompson, 'only a man'. Don't tell Penelope I listen this as she'll make me wear headphones (as I tell her to when she listens to Fleetwood Mac - das unt uncool, ya)!

Penelope: I make Odysseus wings, to remind you all that I am an artist actually and as an excuse to put in some technical detail to make my career choice sound real and not made up to justify this one scene. Odysseus is at the mercy of the Fates, however, and even my wings cannot save him, now that his feet have fallen off (oh, sorry, was that part rushed? Only I thought, seeing as the book's all about me really, you'd like to spend a huge amount of time on my wedding day. Odysseus won't mind, he can time travel over this bit, again and again).

Odysseus: Sometimes I get really quite rather very annoyed that people think that I'm just a sci-fi character, but that's not true. If they hadn't thought up a condition to try to explain my time travelling ability I would have been a magic realist romance (so much to thank Borges for), perhaps, but I really am not a sci-fi character at all, that's all a myth. However, giving me a toe hole into that genre does improve my sales. Sci-fi fans seem not to care about the other elements of my make up: hearing them go on and on about how science fiction writers invented this that and the other is like hearing Penelope go on and on about tuna. It's all a myth. I keep travelling back to that same sentence, probably because it is of great significance to me in my life, even though I may never understand why, not even if I look it up in my big Random House dictionary or read all of Ovid.

Penelope: Some might say my life is a cliché, or that some of the characters and racial stereotypes are clichéd, too.

Odysseus: Some people may not be able to discern a difference in the narrative voices of Penelope or I.

Penelope: Some people may have to refer back to the name at the beginning of each passage to remind themselves which character is speaking as it is not always clear from the actions being shown in the narrative - unless there is a quantity of nakedness, or tuna at hand - especially as both Odysseus and I have a fondness for Laura Ashley.

Odysseus: It's all because I practically live at the library. If I didn't, I probably wouldn't feel the need to drop in literary references every five minutes.

"And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing which would infinitely enrich your life: the powerful, uniquely uncommon, the awakening of dormant stones, depths that would reveal you to yourself. In the dusk you notice the book shelves with their volumes in gold and in brown; and you think of far lands you journeyed, of pictures and of shimmering gowns worn by women you conquered and lost. And it comes to you all of a sudden: That was it! And you arise, for you are aware of a year in your distant past with its fears and events and prayers". - Rainer Maria Rilke.

Odysseus: I could go on and on, but that would be epic.

Penelope: Odysseus goes on and on, but I should have the last word, after all I am his wife and this is all about me.

Nude Zealand

I've got some exciting news, I won't beat about the easel, I'll lay it bare...

...Nuala Ní Chonchúir is coming to New Zealand to Kick off her world tour to promote her new book of short fiction Nude...and the best bit...she's starting the tour here!

That's right, I'm going to be hosting the first stop off! How cool is this?!

(I've only ever hosted a sheep tick before so I hope I can pull this off!)

And that's where I need you, dear bloggers. I'm going to be interviewing Nuala (AKA WOMEN RULE WRITER), and I thought it might be fun to have a little audience participation.

Interested?

Follow me into my studio and I will elaborate.

By all means take a seat - but not that one! It has wet paint on it. Phewsh!

Oh, just look how the light has illuminated your cheek...I digress...so...here's the thing. I'm going to be asking Nuala some questions and I thought, wow, of all the times I would have loved to ask a 'real' writer some questions, and now I can! And wouldn't it be great to share that feeling?

This is what I'm going to do. I am offering you, dear bloggers, the opportunity to ask Nuala a question of your own. Here's the deal. I get to ask three questions. I'm giving up my third question to one of you, so it had better be a good one.

Rules: it has to be a question about writing or about Nude.

What's in it for you? You mean, that isn't enough? You're a tough bunch to please.

Well, Nude is published by Salt (and is available to buy now - ha), and Salt's website receives '80,000 visits a month...14 million hits a year'.

Uh? Not following?

As a little thank you for hosting Nuala, I get my blog profiled on Salt's website - yup - I get (in theory) 80,000 extra visits to my blog per month (that's 80,006 bloggers in total!) As my reward to you guys for your questions, I will guest profile your blogs, thus sending that extra traffic your way, too.

Now are you interested?

I'll only be asking one of your questions mind, the rest of you will still get profiled for contributing though - that sound fair?

I look forward to writing your portrait!