The next big thing
The wonderful poet and fiction-writer Noel Duffy set
me a challenge a few weeks back to follow him in this literary chain, where
writers talk about forthcoming books. You can read his splendid account at http://noelduffy.blogspot.ie/
1) What
is the working title of your next book?
My next
collection of poems is provisionally titled Her
Father’s Daughter, which is the way that I’ve been imagining it over the
past couple of years. But I wouldn’t rule out that changing before the book
actually gets published. Titles are slippery things, intimately connected with
both the mood of the poems, but also with the prevailing mood of the writer,
which can change like the weather. I remember finding it very difficult to find
the title of my last collection, Trapping
A Ghost (Bluechrome 2005). There was no individual poem title that seemed
to capture its spirit, and I don’t know how many times I read it through before
seeing an individual line from a poem that seemed to offer the best potential
as a book title. And then it seemed to have been to have always been the title.
Strange, but true.
2)
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I’ve been meditating
about father –daughter relationships for at least the last seven years, and
probably for much longer than that, because family relationships have always
been an obsession in my poetry. But the impetus for this exploration was my
father’s first serious illness which, oddly, began this day 7 years ago, when
he collapsed with a pulmonary embolism and was rushed to hospital, where he
wasn’t expected to survive. We spent those anguished and terrified days all
through Christmas and the New Year at St. James’s Hospital Intensive Care Unit;
that bare little room with the drinks machine that never worked and the
flickering cathode lights has stayed with me ever since. He recovered from
that, but had suffered so much of what the doctors termed ‘collateral damage’
that his remaining few years were dogged with illness. So I guess I began a
prolonged period of grieving him, or preparing to let him go (he died in June
2010) and that’s what generated many of the poems. But gradually I got
perspective to see wider patterns; I’d separately been fascinated by my
maternal grandfather, many of whose stories I’d heard from my mother, so I
began to see a connection between two sets of father-daughter relationships,
and that’s how the book was really born.
3) What
genre does your book fall under?
It’s a
collection of poems, some lyric, some narrative. I always find myself wanting
to tell stories but need the compression that poetry provides at the same time.
4) What
actors would you choose to play the part of the characters in the movie
rendition?
These
questions are rather geared towards fiction, I suspect, and yet I can imagine a
movie treatment of my grandfather’s story, at least. I think Aidan Quinn would render
him very well; the same intensity, the same pale blue Irish eyes that can chill
and warm at the same time.
5) What
is a one-line synopsis of your book?
I’ve
spoken about the lure of compression in poetry so I should find that question
easy, shouldn’t I? And yet!!! Well, it’s a book about relationships and the
patterns they create and engrain, as well as about the ability to love while
knowing one is going to lose somebody.
6)
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agent?
As my good friend Noel
Duffy said in his interview, you’d never find an agent with a vocation for
representing poets. That reminds me of an agents’ tea party organised by the
Creative Writing faculty at the University of East Anglia, where I did my
Masters in 2003. There were some very heavy-hitters invited down from London to
meet the cream of the writing talent in my year, and there were some amazing
novelists then – Tash Aw, Naomi Alderman and our own Aifric Campbell to name
just three. But it was made clear to us poets that there wasn’t any point in us
attending the Tea Party because the agents had no interest in meeting us. So we
were left to gaze in, like the poor children outside the toyshop at Christmas.
Very poignant. I’m hoping the collection will be published by Salmon, who
published my last book.
7) How
long did it take you to write a first draft of the manuscript?
As I said
earlier, I’d been writing many of these poems for several years, but the real
work of pulling them together into book form began about three years ago, after
I’d published the verse novel. Then it became a process of ordering and
re-ordering, which may continue for a wee while yet.
8)
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Poets are always writing
about their parents, aren’t they? One book that certainly influenced me, though
I’d never reach its wonderful heights, was Kerry Hardie’s amazing collection The Sky Didn’t Fall, written about her
own father’s death. I loved the complete lack of self-pity, the honesty and
bravery and utter beauty of that book.
9)
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
As should be evident from
previous answers, my wonderful father, Donal J. O’Mahony, and my amazing
mother, Mai O’Mahony, who is an extraordinary story-teller and who has a
staggering memory for events that took place up to 80 years ago. She has always
been my inspiration.
10) What
else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
I always
find it hard to answer that question, because why should anyone else care about
my own concerns. But we all have people we love and might lose, or might have
lost, and many of us in Ireland share a connection with a generation of
extraordinary men and women who went about fighting for the ideals they
believed in with quietness and integrity. So hopefully my book might resonate
in some way with those sorts of readers.
I am now
passing the baton in this extended literary relay race to novelist, poet,
blogger and performer Kate Dempsey. Here’s her bio:
Kate
Dempsey writes fiction and poetry and lives in Ireland. She has been collecting
jobs for her author biography since she could read. She has worked as a coffee
grinder, a terrible waitress in Woolworths, a Harrods shop assistant, a
computer programmer, a technical writer, a writer in schools and a mother.
She's lived in England, Scotland, The Netherlands, South West USA and now in
Ireland.
These diverse jobs and homes are reflected in her witty, observational writing,
which is widely published in Ireland and the UK. Her short stories have been
broadcast on RTE Radio and published in the Poolbeg Anthology 'Do The Write
Thing.' She was shortlisted for the Hennessey New Irish Writing award three
times and her poetry in many magazines and anthologies. She runs the Poetry
Divas Collective, a glittering group of women who blur the wobbly boundaries
between page and stage at cool events all over Ireland.
Her first
novel, The Story of Plan B, was shortlisted for the London Book Fair LitIdol.
Where to find Kate Dempsey online
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