Guardian Books

 My mini review of Becky Manawatu's Auē is in The Guardian.

Winter school

Feeling champion to have been selected to attend the University of Limerick Creative Writing Winter School.

Some things

Some Things the English made the longlist of the Michael Gifkins Prize for an Unpublished Novel!

"This was the inaugural year for this prize and we received 182 applications. We congratulate you on achieving the longlist for this prize. The selectors commented that: ‘the selection revealed an extraordinary diversity of writing and an enviable depth of talent. It was a difficult process to arrive at our shortlist of three novels.’"

Stoked

Short list

Some Things the English made the Cinnamon Press Novel Competition shortlist;
I couldn't be happier;
sincere thanks to Jan Fortune and all at Cinnamon Press;
and massive congratulations to overall winner Jennifer Young!

As kings or serfs

 

Click on the cover to buy.

Miss Emily Blog Tour

Ms Rae Has a Visitor!

Thanks be – it’s Nuala O’Connor on the blog to talk about her latest novel, MissEmily. 


The Dickinson household is saved from domestic chaos with the arrival of Ada Concannon, a “neat little Irish person, fresh off the boat”. Amherst in the 1800s is a pastoral environment for the homesick young maid who finds in the gifted middle child, Emily, a fellow feeling; they were born on the same day, they share a sense of mischief and a love of baking. Emily’s fledgling poetry and passion for words is her true vocation but as it begins to dominate her mind, she retreats from the small world around her and enters her infamous white phase. The friendship that forms between the two women is tested when Ada’s personal safety and reputation is violated and Emily finds herself tasked with defending her maid against her own family and those she loves, with shocking consequences. 

 

“Only this morning I dropped a spoon first and soon after a knife, so I knew a visitor would be calling before the day was out.” p33


They do say Ms Rae loves company, do they not?

Ms Rae:

“A Resonance of Emerald”

Miss Emily was my fond companion from first page to last. It’s presence in my hand was wont to set tongues wagging. I love that you gave equal voice to the characters of Emily Dickinson and Ada, her Irish maid, and I wanted to ask you – as a working-class woman myself – if you considered how important your novel is in that it portrays a strong working-class protagonist, if not on equal footing, at least in terms of equal significance to readers?

Ms Nuala:

Yes, it was important. The novel is as much about social division as about friendship. Can people across classes really be proper friends or is there always an imbalance? Ada is not a sorrowful immigrant – she is a strong, forward-looking young woman who delights in the adventure of leaving Ireland for America. It was important that she had equal footing with Emily Dickinson in the novel, so it is a dual narrative where the two women narrate alternate chapters.

Ms Rae:

“There’s a certain Slant of Light”

Ada is not the only working-class character – no token friendship here – as Emily’s confidante, sister-in-law Sue, a near constant in the real Emily’s life, also features prominently in Miss Emily. Real-life Susan was the daughter of a taverner, rising through the social ranks by virtue of his death and her marriage to Emily’s brother, Austin. Miss Emily captures the transformative essence of Dickinson’s poetry. And as with her poetry – what is often most notable is what is omitted from it – so much resides within a dash – so it is with details of Emily and Sue’s relationship.

“…as always with Sue, I bend to her desire. Her mind is occupied with Austin and with ironing out domestic rucks, which is as it should be. We drink our tea and listen to the clock tick and Baby Martha’s fossicking noises from her bassinette. If Sue cannot come to me in Spirit today, all I can do is endure it; there are days when she cools and retreats and this is one of them, I fear. We sit on, drink our tea, and the clock’s pendulum seems to become drowsy and ponderous, as if the air has grown fat. The ticking sounds sluggish to my ears, it goes slow, slow, slow, then, halt.” p136

Your portrayal of Sue is remarkably nuanced – she is adorer of and adored by Emily, but she is also snobbish, particularly towards Ada. I thought you captured the internal anguish a woman from Sue’s beginnings must have had in the presence of someone who would have reminded her how easily traversed the social ladder could be – how one might slip down its rungs as rapidly as one had climbed – and I wondered how much you consciously cultivated these nuances and how much of Sue’s character was evident from documentation, correspondence with Emily, and so forth? Susan is a triumph of characterisation. Could you talk a little about the research process, what went into the book?

Ms Nuala:

Sue is problematic in that a lot of our views on her (other than Emily’s) come from people with agendas, like her husband’s mistress and that woman’s daughter. She has been painted rather black, but Emily saw her as luminous and really appreciated everything about Sue – her cleverness, her social skills, her beauty. I took my portrait of her mostly from Emily and a little from the hearsay. With Emily and Ada both so good-natured, I needed the balance of semi-villains and so I made Austin and Sue those people. It felt slightly betraying but, in terms of fiction, it has to be done. Two Dickinson scholars are in the process of writing new biographies of Sue and I really hope they unearth more of the good things about her.

Ms Rae:

“The Heart asks Pleasure – first – ”

One of my favourite parts of the novel is when Miss Emily narrates of Ada’s feelings for Daniel Byrne as Ada tends to Emily’s dresses – her favourite being “a snowy cotton wrapper with mother-of-pearl buttons and a pocket” – I especially love the duality of the prose:

I court vicariously through Ada and Daniel Byrne; I watch their shy, sweet glances tossed like luck pennies back and forward in the kitchen. Sometimes a stray penny lands on me and I pocket it gratefully. p118

I fair marvel at the outward observation’s facilitating the reader’s insight into Miss Emily’s life and character. But I especially admire how you fashion not only the machinery of Emily’s poetry, her character and mind and words, but also the storehouse for them, such as her pockets. You marry metaphor and fact as perhaps only a poet could. An acclaimed poet yourself, where did your interest in this particular story spring?

Ms Nuala:

I loved Emily’s poetry at school – it appealed to my sense of teenage gothic gloom. We didn’t read her happy poems much! I heard a few years ago that Emily loved to bake, as I do, so I began to bake her recipes for Black Cake, Coconut Cake and gingerbread and I was thinking about Irish domestics and it all coalesced into a poem first and gradually a novel.

Ms Rae:

“The Soul selects her own Society”

Emily didn’t take to housework – or receiving visitors, unlike Sue – nor it seems did Ada, though she didn’t have much choice! “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –”. There’s a description of Ada dusting and another of her cajoling hens to lay, and of her plucking one (standing over it, not hung as was her mother’s preference) – nature domesticated is abundant in Miss Emily, described so beautifully by Emily and, surprisingly, Ada. Even when describing the view of her home town as the boat pulls her away, Ada says, “Dublin lies like a big dozy cow, not able to shake the sleep off herself.” In another section of the novel, Miss Emily explains to Ada about her name being a palindrome and I thought it a great analogy for reflection, for Emily and Ada being so alike but for their circumstances differing. 

Emily: Ada, you are like a breath from Madagascar p45

Ada: I shrug but, truth be told, I am as pleased as a dog with two pockets. p47

Could you talk a little about the importance of nature to both Emily and Ada, and where your inspiration for Ada came from?

Ms Nuala:

Emily loved to bake, which is one type of housework, and she also loved all natural things – much of her oeuvre is about nature and/or uses images from the natural world. She was a devoted gardener, like her mother, and she studied botany at school. Ada grew up in Tigoora in west Dublin which is, essentially, the Liffey Valley, so she was immersed in rivers, trees and flowers, much as Emily was.

I needed to invent a maid to give me fictional freedom as I was already working with the facts of the Dickinson lives. However I made Ada a cousin of one of the Dickinsons’ real Irish maids, Maggie Maher, who was a Tipperary native. In that way Ada is still connected firmly to reality and history.

Ms Rae:

“Fame is a bee.”

Considering how prolific Dickinson was, little of her work was published in her lifetime and, it seems, even her own family knew not of the volume she had written until after her death. And it was much later still when her poems were published as they had been written in her hand. Contrast this with what would be recorded of a maid, however, and the picture for the majority of women of the period in which Emily lived appears like a faded Daguerreotype. You are brilliant at recording lives and moments of women’s existences that would otherwise go unwritten. What would you like your legacy to be?

Sue lifted her face to me. “I really liked the poem you sent to me yesterday, Emily. There is such joy in it. I could not say I understood it all, but the image of the bee was rather beautiful. You find poetry everywhere, my dear.”

Ms Nuala:

Women are horribly absent from our historical education, as we know. Today they are also still not hugely visible in many professions, including the writing world. Like many historical fiction writers who take women as their main characters (Emma Donoghue, for example), I want to bring women in history into the light. Social, domestic and material history are much more interesting to me than, say, warfare. I find the term ‘Herstory’ a bit clunky but maybe it’s one to embrace? So, in terms of legacy, I want to add to the herstoriness of history, rewrite the script and look at women mostly, but also look at people as people first, as opposed to as kings or serfs. 

 

 Nuala by Emilia Krysztofiak

Nuala O'Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland, she lives in East Galway. Already well-known under the name Nuala Ní Chonchúir, she has published four short story collections, the most recent Mother America appeared from New Island in 2012. Her third poetry collection The Juno Charm was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011 and Nuala’s critically acclaimed second novel The Closet of Savage Mementos appeared April 2014, also from New Island; it was shortlisted for the Kerry Irish Novel of the Year Award 2015. In summer 2015, Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and Sandstone (UK) publish Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid. www.nualanoconnor.com

Catch up with previous stops on the Miss Emily blog tour here, here & here.

Read reviews here & here.

And find out about the research process here.

Some previous interviews with Nuala can be read here & here. 

 Miss Emily

Nuala O’ Connor

Published 20^th August

p/b £8.99

978191024550

e-book £8.99

9781910124567

Tour of beauty

I'm delighted to be interviewing acclaimed novelist and award-winning short story writer Tom Vowler today as part of his blog tour to launch the paperback publication of That Dark Remembered Day. 

As a special treat to Snow Like Thought visitors, Tom's offering one lucky reader a chance to read his novel for free - read on for details.

Tom, firstly, congratulations, That Dark Remembered Day is your second novel and is a deeply engrossing and thought-provoking read. 

Wolf

That Dark Remembered Day is a story ostensibly about the events surrounding one day, except for that day being a day within a day for a character called Richard, a soldier who has recently returned from active combat in the Falklands.  

Could you talk a little about why you chose to set your novel in the ‘80s?

Well, it wasn’t for my love of the era’s music. I suppose I became fascinated in a war that was the last untelevised one. Certainly there was coverage of the Falklands, but it was drip-fed and highly censored. The imbedding of journalists on the frontline didn’t really happen until the first Gulf War. So I had this vague recollection of a conflict, almost over before it began, and I wondered if there wasn’t some untold aspect of it. I think it’s still regarded as an unqualified success, yet Britain came very close to defeat and casualties on both sides were relatively high, the fighting at times brutal and close-quarter. For me, though, the startling fact was how more British veterans of the conflict have committed suicide since their return than died on the battlefield. I was also keen to explore Argentine experiences or the war.

Hunters

It becomes apparent that Richard has been seriously affected by events in the Falklands and his condition is exasperated when his former Sergeant pays a house call on him.

Tell us about Richard’s condition. How did you first become interested in PTSD? 

Richard is a reluctant soldier, his career hastily chosen, following his father into the forces. Put simply, he’s not build for army life, his nature too sensitive, too introvert. This leads to his bullying, which finally convinces him to get out, to start a new life with his family. But a week before his release, a small island group in the South Atlantic is invaded.

His experiences, the decisions he has to make over the coming months, leave him deeply scarred, although one of the features of post-traumatic stress can be its insidious onset, its manifestation rising months or even years later and with little obvious sign. Past traumatic events are experienced again with great clarity, the sufferer often unable to distinguish them from reality. Some of the novel is structured to recreate this disorientation in the reader, to mimic symptoms of PTSD.

Townsfolk 

I was thinking about representations of war in novels such as The Yellow Birds and Birdsong, where combat has far reaching consequences but is essentially framed apart from civilian life, the two contrasted, and the events are narrated from just one perspective. Your novel is told from three perspectives, Richard’s being one of them, and it becomes evident early on that combative and civilian life have become indistinguishable for him, and his behaviour has devastating consequences for the locals where he lives, doesn’t it? 

This is the heart of the book in many ways, how an event ripples out, impacting the lives of people who have no connection to it. Every decision we make, however inconsequential it seems, affects the world in some way, changes its state, even the observing of an atom changes it. What if a car is careering out of control, about to pass my house, when my phone rings, keeping me at home a minute longer? Do I owe the caller my life? What about my neighbour, whose phone didn’t ring, who stepped out into the road? In the novel there’s a case to make about a faulty firing mechanism on a gun leading a year later to a tragedy affecting dozens. 

Little Bird

The social and moral implications of your novel are far reaching and you dedicate That Dark Remembered Day to “victims of violence, be it arbitrary or state-sponsored”, so I was thinking about novels as protest, then I got to thinking about other examples of literature where the state’s actions have been called into question. You reference Peter and the Wolf, twice, and I wonder if you could talk a little about its narrative function in your novel?

I’m not sure the novel is best served by overt protest, which tends to come at the expense of the narrative. But of course characters are political creatures, as are the events they experience, so in this sense every book is a social and/or moral commentary. I hope I’m never didactic or preachy, though; the story must come first, must be all. And yet one’s primordial swamp will always seep up into the work. Perhaps this is most apparent when Mary considers joining the women of the anti-nuclear peace camp at Greenham Common, despite her husband being a former serviceman. Is my book an anti-war novel? I hope so, but that’s not for me to decide.

In That Dark Remembered Day, Richard’s daughter, Jenny, buys a copy of Peter and the Wolf, an audio book with a pair of 45s tucked into its sleeves (something I too owned as a child, spellbound as I was by the instruments that each represent a character). Of course there is huge allegorical significance here – the hunting, the violence, the landscape, the woods – as well as a sign of the redemption and hope to come.

Duck

Sound is a trigger for Richard’s condition. I was thinking how well Peter and the Wolf paralleled the duality of the familiar and unfamiliar for Richard in its use of instruments to represent characters. But I was also thinking about form, what its implications were in Soviet Russia in the ‘30s. Peter and the Wolf is a pseudo-fairy-tale, but it doesn’t comply with that genre’s model: there’s no reward for its hero, for example, and its villain goes unpunished.  There’s another parallel here. If (humour me) Richard was a character in Peter and the Wolf, who, for example, would he be: Peter or the Wolf?

A key feature of PTSD is the reliving of sound, in this case Richard’s war experiences, the flashbacks, nightmares and hallucinations vividly felt. I certainly mined my own childhood for some of the book, the sound of Prokofiev’s composition still resonant now when I recall my own father dropping needle onto vinyl, hearing the instruments introduced, the fear as the wolf was announced. I was keen not to write a hero into the story, which would seem to detract from the horror of war. Richard is, of course, both Peter and the wolf. As we all are.

Peter

Prokofiev represented the character of Peter with string instruments. Tell me about Mary’s violin, why does she keep it in the cupboard?

It’s a symbol of her unrealised life, how having been first a wife, then a mother, an awakening rises in her, to live in a manner of her choosing, to resist the direction 1980s society was taking. She wants to consume less, recycle, become more self-sufficient (something that’s trendy now, but hardly existed then). Even her career as a nurse has involved the care of others, and in seeing a live performance she recalls her latent musical ambition. Later, as she considers infidelity, the violin is used as a tool of seduction.

Cat

I want to ask you about the dog. I thought it interesting, though not unusual for a pet, that it was anthropomorphised to the extent it was, simply by its being named Shane (the nearest character to an actual wolf is an Australian bowler!). As with Richard’s character, the dog has two functions, is both animal and person, wild and domestic. I kept waiting for the dog to do something significant, but it seemed just as impotent as the other characters, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about power and agency in your novel. 

*walks out in a huff at the cricket reference, before returning to the crease* I’d counter that the dog does nothing significant. It’s chosen at the animal sanctuary by the family together, but of course the children soon lose interest, it being an older dog. And so Richard is forced to walk it in the woods, which becomes his sanctuary, the origin of his obsession with the peregrines. The dog, sullen when Richard is away training, becomes more morose with its master’s extended absence for war, Mary struggling to form a bond with it. But the change comes during Richard’s decent into his traumatic state, whereupon the dog’s nature also shifts subtly, snarling at Mary for the first time, despite her being the hand that feeds it. In the end the dog is the only one Richard is capable of being around, its undemanding company, its lack of judgment towards him all he can deal with. There’s a nod here to a favourite novel, Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, which has at its heart a relationship between a man and his dog.

Parade

In Prokofiev’s symphony, all the parts are narrated, with exception of the final parade that is left to the listener to decode from the musical key they have been provided with throughout the previous movements. As already mentioned, Prokofiev’s tale doesn’t fulfil the conventions of its genre. There is no death. Could you narrate us out?

That Dark Remembered Day has its own quiet parade, Richard’s possible sighting of bird his father never saw. Endings are notoriously difficult to get right and of course I’m not the one to judge whether or not I have. I think this book got under my skin more than others; certainly your penetrative questions have teased out much of the emotion I felt during its research and composition. But that’s it now. My journey with it ends. It’s for others to make of it what they will.

 

Click on cover to buy.

Tom Vowler is a novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His debut collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize in 2010 and his novel What Lies Within received critical acclaim. He is co-editor of the literary journal Short Fiction and an associate lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, where he’s completing a PhD. That Dark Remembered Day is his second novel. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk

Thank you for stopping by, Tom. That Dark Remembered Day is a beautiful and lyrical novel, despite the tragedy at its core, and I wish you the very best with it and for the rest of your blog tour:

Scott Pack	19/6	Fun Quiz
Dan Powell	26/6	On Structure

Tania Hershman	10/7	Word Association
Vanessa Gebbie	17/7	On Peregrines
Sara Crowley	24/7	Smash Lits
Kathy Eastman	31/7	Something Funky
Jen Campbell	7/8	Interview
Nuala Ní Chonchúir	14/8	On Writing

That Dark Remembered Day is published by Headline and is available to buy here. 

Tom’s also giving away one copy – leave a comment to be in the hat – lucky winner drawn in a week’s time.