Tell us about your second novel, Saoirse.
Saoirse is a story about an Irish-based artist living in Donegal under a stolen identity. Her peaceful life is threatened after she wins a major visual art award, attracting unwanted media attention.
Like your protagonist, you’ve moved from the US to Ireland. Tell us about that experience. Did you feel as comfortable setting scenes in Ireland as in the US?
Ireland is home; I have lived here longer than I ever lived in the US. For example, I have never been a mother in the US, so my language around parenthood was developed entirely in an Irish context. And also, I have the lived experience of being a young woman in a place that often didn’t feel safe, so there is a confidence, a fluency, as such, between the two settings.
Saoirse is an artist and you are too. Artist protagonists are often writers in disguise, but do you feel your own practice gave the character more depth?
For Saoirse, art was a way to turn chaos into order. It placed her at the centre of her own reinvention. I certainly have used writing and art to process difficult issues. It is a way of turning things around and working them from a different angle.
Tell us about The Peatlands Installation and your other artworks.
It was initially a collaboration between many artists and musicians, combining film, photography and drawings to highlight the biodiversity and wild beauty of the bogs and wetlands of Ireland and was opened by Manchán Magan. Tina Claffey and Kathrine Geoghegan are co-ordinating future exhibitions.
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Saoirse has many bad men in her life but at least one good one in Daithí, “the Mr Darcy of Donegal” (Louise Nealon). Is it harder to portray a good person?
Saoirse has a lot of both bad men and women in her life. Psychologically speaking, people fall into relationship patterns that feel familiar rather than good. As a conversation in a later chapter reveals, finding relative safety with the entitled Byrne family is little more than an upgrade to her initial circumstances. She ultimately changes the script of what she deserves. Enter Daithí.
Tell us about your powerful debut novel, The Polite Act of Drowning (2023).
My debut centres around 16-year-old Joanne Kennedy, whose life is irrevocably changed when a teenage girl drowns in Kettle Lake. The tragedy dredges up untold secrets and causes her mother to drift farther from reality and her family.
You’re from a big family: did that make you an observer? What else made you a writer?
It made me someone who needed to turn chaos into order. I often turned to reading, and reading made me a writer.
How important is it for you to have studied creative writing and to teach it?
I do believe reading is our best teacher. I’ll never forget discovering certain influential writers, including Danielle McLaughlin and Claire Keegan.
How to parent is a theme in your writing. Could you expand on that?
It does seem to be a recurring theme in my work: adults let children down, and then I work to bring them to a place of safety. Also, librarians – I’ve only recently noticed this: in my stories there is always a librarian opening the door to new possibilities.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Not a literary one but I did travel to the coastal village of Catterline to the locations where artist Joan Eardley painted.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Feedback on writing is an opinion, not a prescription. Follow your gut.
Who do you admire the most?
People in Minnesota and others around the US who are stepping up to protect their neighbours against the cruelty and chaos of Ice. Also, Bad Bunny.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
Criminalise the obscene accumulation of wealth. Or at lease mandate its redistribution. See quotation.
What is your favourite quotation?
“The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” – Andrew Carnegie, builder of libraries.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
H is for Hawk is a quiet and moving film on grief; Louise Nealon’s Everything That is Beautiful and Danielle McLaughlin’s Rituals. Both brilliant, out in April.
Which public event affected you most?
Israel’s relentless destruction of the Palestinian people, and the complicity of the world in their devastation.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Ephesus, Rome, Florence and the Irish Peatlands.
Your most treasured possession?
Notebooks full of jottings: little funny things from when my children were small.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
A used book my sister found for me: The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck, translated by Alfred Sutro, originally written in 1901.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Maeve Binchy, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath; Michelle Gallen to bring the craic; Nigella Lawson, the cake.
The best and worst things about where you live?
Right now, Ireland feels like the right place to be.
A book to make me laugh?
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, and Sophie White’s Such a Good Couple, both full of humanity.
A book that might move me to tears?
Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
Saoirse is published by Eriu on February 26th
