John Banville, from “Mefisto”

John Banville/Benjamin Black (1945-)

Bio, British Council Literature:

Irish novelist John Banville was born in Wexford in Ireland in 1945.

He was educated at a Christian Brothers’ school and St Peter’s College in Wexford. He worked for Aer Lingus in Dublin, an opportunity that enabled him to travel widely. He was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. It was followed byNightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels.

Banville’s fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr Copernicus(1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series was about the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler(1981) and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), is the story of an academic writing a book about the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. It was adapted as a film by Channel 4 Television. Mefisto (1986), explores the world of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus.

The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993) and Athena(1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville’s 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an actor who has withdrawn to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud (2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse andPrague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of the magical European city.

John Banville lives in Dublin. The Sea (2005) won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. InThe Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays. His latest novel is The Infinities (2009). He received the Franz Kafka Award in 2011.

…Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual.

While his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic realism, it is best understood as metafiction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Banville’s acknowledged mentor. Like Beckett, he moves fluidly from Irish landscapes and characters to European contexts and histories, and from conventional narratives into fabulism and distortion. Relentlessly and some might argue, pretentiously allusive, his works play with both overt and hidden references to his literary idols, particularly Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov.

…One of the hallmarks of Banville’s writing is an inter-textual repetition, the carrying of motifs or allusions from novel to novel. Mefisto (1986), the fourth book of his scientific tetralogy, is a Faustian tale of a mathematical prodigy, Gabriel Swan, whose carnivalesque adventures in a fun fair, (together with his Proustian associations) artfully recall the earlier Birchwood. In the enigmatic trilogy of novels which succeeds the tetralogy, this pattern of recurrence is conspicuous, and a central character, Freddie Montgomery, traced across three dramatically different contexts. Here the figure of the scientist gives way to the painter, as visual art becomes the primary channel for the author’s meditation on perception and representation. And where the tetralogy threw the role of human imagination into crisis, the trilogy, to some extent, offers a reinvestment in the necessary creative fictions of human invention. Collectively, therefore, these novels mitigate some of Banville’s earlier scepticism, despite their flirtation with the archetypal postmodernist jeux of gapped and inconsistent narration, non-sequential chronology, and the blurring of ‘truth’ and fantasy.

…The black humour and lucidity which save Banville’s work from becoming abstruse are dominant in what some regard as his finest novel. The Untouchable (1997) presents the recollections of Victor Maskell, a figure loosely based on the Royal art curator Anthony Blunt, who was exposed in 1979 as one of the Cambridge spy ring. More accessible perhaps than its predecessors, this work is a biographical study of individuality in freefall, released from the constructions of nationhood and patriotism, and obsessed with the abnegation of self required by the act of betrayal. Quite unlike the existential Gothic melodramas to which he has returned in his most recent fiction, Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), The Untouchable also offers salient reminders of Banville’s roots in the fractured condition of Irishness, an identity which continues to provide him with traditional thematic and narrative mainstays beneath the veneer of a cerebral European experimentalism.

Website for his alter ego, Benjamin Black:

A really terrific interview at The Paris Review:

…As a novelist, he is famous for his difficulty. In their architecture and in their style, his books are like baroque cathedrals, filled with elaborate passages and sometimes overwhelming to the casual tourist. For this, Banville makes no apologies—he says he is committed to language and to rhythm above plot, characterization, or pacing. Being Benjamin Black, however, allows him to play more loosely with character and storytelling; in interviews and in correspondence, he refers to Black (“the rogue”) fondly and mischievously, delightedly playing this identity against his own. As Black he has written three novels in as many years: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), and The Lemur (2008). Although the company of Black diverted him awhile from the agony of producing what he calls “a Banville book,” a new novel under his own name, The Infinities, is forthcoming.

INTERVIEWER:  When did you first know that you wanted to write?

BANVILLE:  It must have been in my early teens. My brother was living in Africa at the time, and although he has no memory of this he would occasionally send me books, one of which was James Joyce’s Dubliners. The book was a revelation to me—the idea that literature could be very elevated but still be about life as I knew it, about the rather grim, gray, mundane life I was living as a boy in Wexford in the fifties. When I finished Dubliners, I started writing terrible pastiches of Joyce on an enormous black Remington typewriter borrowed from my Aunt Sadie. I threw them all away many years later, of course, but I remember the opening of one of them: “The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”

A boy in his teens! What did I know about death? This is a problem for Irish writers—our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can’t possibly reach. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer. Anyway, hunched there over my Aunt Sadie’s Remington, I was starting to learn how to write. Now, fifty years later, I’m still learning.

…INTERVIEWER:  What attracted you to novel writing?

BANVILLE:  Language. Words. The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language, and this was as true then as it is now. I also had that wonderful conviction that writers have at the beginning that the possibilities are infinite. I didn’t realize just how difficult it was going to be. I thought that within five or six years I would be a fully fledged writer. Here I am now, at the age of sixty-two, still diligently practicing. But I loved, and still love, the craft. I am a graphomaniac. I cannot not write. If I find myself with a spare forty-five minutes at the end of my working day, I will turn to adding a few sentences to something. One of the reasons I love doing journalism—that is, reviews and literary articles—is that I can do it quickly. It gives me a craftsman’s pleasure. Fiction doesn’t do that. Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I’m passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right.

INTERVIEWER:  Do you really hate your own novels?

BANVILLE:  Yes! I hate them. I mean that. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. They’re an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than everybody else’s, of course, but not good enough for me. There is a great deal more pain than pleasure in writing fiction. It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going. When I read the proofs of a new novel—which is the last time I will read or even glance at it—I approach it with one eye closed, so to speak, thinking, God, what am I going to find here? And I find horrors, horrors that can’t be fixed. Everything in the text now seems hopelessly flat and deadened. Where I imagined a dancing rhythm, I find clumping and stumbling.

…INTERVIEWER:  Where do you think your discipline came from?

BANVILLE:  I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.

…

INTERVIEWER:  When did you begin to write your Benjamin Black books?

BANVILLE:  I finished The Sea in September 2004, and it was published in April 2005. I started writing Christine Falls in March 2005, and it went very quickly. I was staying at the house of a friend in Italy. I sat down at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and by lunchtime I had written more than fifteen hundred words. It was a scandal! I thought, John Banville, you slut. But then I remembered it was Black, not Banville, who was writing. I had fun doing it and I thought, if this has to be my day job, if Benjamin Black is going to earn some money so that John Banville can have freedom, then this is no more difficult than working in the newspapers.

On the day The Sea was short-listed for the Man Booker, my agent handed my publisher the manuscript of Christine Falls. No one knew it was coming—I hadn’t announced my new project to anybody. My publisher was just beside himself with glee. Of course, everyone tried to persuade me not to use the pseudonym, but I wanted people to realize that this wasn’t an elaborate postmodernist literary joke, but the genuine article, a noir novel from Banville’s dark brother Benjamin Black. It was pure play when I invented Benjamin Black. It was a frolic of my own.

…INTERVIEWER: Is Benjamin Black’s process really so different from John Banville’s?

BANVILLE:  If I’m Benjamin Black, I can write up to two and a half thousand words a day. As John Banville, if I write two hundred words a day I am very, very happy. A Banville novel will take me up to five years to write. When I’d finished The Lemur, the third Benjamin Black book, and sat down to become John Banville again, I worked one Friday for six hours straight, and I ended up with one sentence. Not a particularly good sentence, either. But I was thrilled to be back working in that strange, deep level of concentration. That’s the distinction—what you get in Banville is concentration, what you get from Black is spontaneity. I know there are readers who consider Black a better writer, certainly a better novelist, than Banville, and perhaps they’re right.

Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour

First, this is just a great writing blog/website.

 

But today, there’s a great guest post by my friend Kyle Minor on beginnings–some of it should sound familiar.  Check it out.

 

This site is one of my favorites.

Benedict Kiely, from “Proxopera”

Benedict Kiely (1919-2007)

From his obituary at The Guardian:

The Irish writer Benedict Kiely, who has died aged 87, overcame the banning of three early novels to enjoy a long and successful literary career. Under Ireland’s censorship laws (since relaxed), the books were deemed to be “in general tendency indecent or obscene”.

Kiely’s first book, Counties of Contention: a Study of the Origins and Implications of the Partition of Ireland (1945), reflected the moderate nationalism that he adhered to all his life. His Poor Scholar (1947) is a critical biography of William Carleton, a pioneer of the modern Irish short story and a major influence on Kiely himself. Modern Irish Fiction (1950) is a work of assured literary criticism.

…  Kiely’s narrative style owes much to the tradition of country storytelling and shares some characteristics with Joyce and Flann O’Brien. He drew on his abandoned religious vocation and the experience of illness in such novels as Honey Seems Bitter (1952), There Was an Ancient House (1955) and Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968). The Cards of the Gambler (1953) is regarded as one of his best, and others combine elements of fantasy and reality.

His forte, however, was the short story. An early story, King’s Shilling, was published in the Irish Bookman, and later stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review and other American magazines. At his best, Kiely came close to matching Frank O’Connor, who championed his work, and Sean O’Faolain.

His work is informed by a deep affection for and exasperation with Ireland, and by an inclusive sense of history and tradition. This is underscored by the anger evident in his last two novels, Proxopera (1977) and Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985), which deal with political violence. In all, he published 10 novels and four volumes of stories, as well as travel books and anthologies. Two volumes of memoirs deal mainly with the Dublin of the 1940s and 1950s. A renowned raconteur, he was also a popular broadcaster.

From the Benedict Kiely website:

Benedict Kiely was born near Dromore, County Tyrone on 15th August 1919. He was the sixth child of Thomas and Sara Alice Kiely. His family moved to Omagh, County Tyrone, when he was only one. This is where he spent his formative years. Benedict was educated at Mount St. Columba’s by the Christian Brothers. His father was a Boer War veteran, who later worked as a survey measurer for the Ordnance Survey. Although the town was largely free of the sectarianism associated with Northern Ireland, intolerance did occasionally rear its head.

…As a schoolboy, he dutifully read the prescribed essays of Addison, Belloc, Chesterton, Hazlitt and Lamb; for pleasure, he read Zane Gray and Edgar Wallace. He was once impressed by a teacher who interrupted a trigonometry lesson to make an impassioned defence of James Joyce – a remarkable introduction to the great writer from an Irish Christian Brother who, as Benedict later remarked, “…made us realise that there was a world where books mattered”.

A post on Proxopera, the novel from which our excerpt is taken:

Proxopera is subtitled A Tale of Modern Ireland (and dedicated ‘to the memory of the Innocent Dead’), and was first published in 1977, at the height of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ (an elastic term: pretty much any year from the 1970s and 80s has been described as ‘at the height of the Troubles’). Anthony Burgess called it “nearly flawless as a piece of literature” and William J Kennedy “a small masterpiece.” Surprisingly, Proxopera does not disappoint.

The book has the connection to the land and tradition of storytelling which we might expect in an Irish tale. The central character, Binchy, has retired to his homeland of County Tyrone, where he remembers from his childhood “the spring that came on an iron spout out of the naked rock.”

…The subject and plot loosely recalls Brian Moore’s Booker-shortlisted novel Lies of Silence, though Proxopera predates that book by 13 years. Kiely’s story is more lyrical than Moore’s, the setting rural rather than urban, and its proximity to the outset of the Troubles gives it a hard edge which the beauty of the writing does not soften. It is tense and thrilling, but rich and complex in its understanding of a man’s relationship with his landscape, and of men’s relationship with their homeland. It is a book which fills me with pleasure at the potential riches in Kiely’s books I’ve yet to read, and despair that such a fine literary creation is out of print (though it is available in Kiely’s Collected Stories. Which is also out of print).

Colum McCann, “Through the Field”

Colum McCann (1965-)

Here’s his own website--very thorough and interesting:

McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. In the early 1980’s he took a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Allison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.

Colum teaches in Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Nathan Englander.

McCann is considered, in every sense, an international artist.  Born in Ireland, he has travelled extensively around the world.  He and his wife Allison lived in Japan for two years.  He currently lives in New York City, where he holds dual Irish and American citizenship.   He is a member of the Irish Academy, Aosdana, and was awarded a Chevalier des arts et lettres by the French government in fall 2009 (making him one of a exclusive number of foreign artists recognised in France for their literary contributions: other recipients have included Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes).

A fantastic interview at The Rumpus:

Another with the National Book Foundation:

BAJ: Did you encounter any blocks or unexpected difficulties in the process? How did you push beyond them?

CM: Let the Great World Spin wasn’t a particularly difficult book for me to write. I suppose I had to juggle a number of different voices, but that’s just part of the job. And I had to do a good deal of editing, but again that’s par for the course. Losing sections is always difficult — I had, for example, written stories about a hot-dog vendor, a Muslim shopkeeper, and an elevator man, and I had even invented a chess game that I was going to notate and put in there. I had worked with a chess grandmaster to figure out a game where black and white come to a mutual stale mate, but in the end it didn’t fit in the novel, and I didn’t want to shoehorn it in there either. I wanted the book to be organic and for it to flow.

I had some difficulties finding the title, but then I came across the Tennyson quote: “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change …” And, as luck would have it, Tennyson had been influenced by a series of sixth century pre-Islamic poems, the Mu’allaqat, which asks the question: “Is there any hope that this desolation can bring me solace?” And when I found that line, my heart skipped a beat or three, because it was exactly what I wanted. But I can’t claim any intelligence on any of this. It arrived for me. I feel like so much of the novel just fell in place, that all I was doing was opening up the windows and letting it come in. I don’t mean this in any sort of false modesty, or to be disingenuous – of course I had to work to get the book where I wanted it to be – but like a lot of work, it really begins to make sense in retrospect. We open up our windows for emotional reasons and then the intelligence of it, the fresh air, comes later.

Years ago I wasn’t able to admit that I never really knew what I was doing, but now I’m able to say that, most of the time, I’m flying on a wing and a prayer. One only hopes the wing holds out and that the prayer has music.

BAJ: One of the elements that all of this year’s fiction finalists share is a deep sense of place, a narrative focus on how time and setting both form and inform the characters’ lives. Did you always know that place would play such a large role inLet the Great World Spin? How did you go about evoking a landscape that would imbue the book with such power and resonance?

CM: The place was made for me already. New York is such a vibrant place to write about. Eight million stories colliding all at once. And what a landscape to operate in. The eye never gets tired. Even the garbage can be acrobatic. So I just look for the language that will reflect that. Our language is so deeply influenced by landscape, and vice versa. But mostly for me it has to do with rhythm and sound. As a writer you have to try to find the music of that place. If it’s the west of Ireland it’s a different music to what it is in New York. So I went out and listened to the different instruments that the city plays …

BAJ: What writers do you enjoy reading? Are there other artists or art forms that influence or inspire your fiction?

CM: If I gave a list of writers I admire we would be here for a decade of Sundays. My bookshelves at home are stacked three deep. I can’t get rid of a book. And I love flickling through them. The art form that most inspires my fiction is photography. I love looking at photographs. I feel that in some ways my job is to become a photographer with words, or to paint with words.

BAJ: As a professor in the Hunter College MFA program and as a writer of such distinction yourself, you have a unique perspective on the state and future of contemporary literature. What advice do you give your students?

CM: I teach alongside Nathan Englander, Peter Carey and Claire Messud. That’s just the fiction program. We have had Don DeLillo come visit class, Ian McEwan, and younger writers like Jeff Talarigo, Nat Rich, Rivka Galchen, Nicole Krauss and Darin Strauss. Seamus Heaney is coming in a few months. As a result of such a strong faculty, we’re lucky to have some of the best students in America. And I love seeing them succeed. Their success is so much less complicated than my own. My advice is for them to develop stamina, to look outside their own lives, and write write write. Develop empathy but have some anger too. Have an adventure in the skin trade. Read your contemporaries. Knock that older writer out of the sky.

 

An awesome interview (but You Tube is full of them, so if you’re interested in him, he’s all over the internet.)

Maeve Kelly, “Orange Horses”

Maeve Kelly (1930-)

 

Biography (excerpts–find the page here):

Born: Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, 1930. Education: Studied nursing at St. Andrew’s Hospital, London. Career: Founder and administrator of Adapt, shelter for victims of domestic violence, 1978—.

Maeve Kelly writes in several genres, and all of her work is informed by clear feminist principles. Born in 1930, Kelly has lived through significant changes in Irish society’s attitudes toward women, but her literary works suggest some of the ways in which the changes have been insufficient. Her fictional representation of what life is like for Irish women is both emotionally and intellectually convincing.

Brian Moore, “The Sight”

Brian Moore (1921-1999)

BBC Obituary:

The Irish American author Brian Moore has died at his home in California at the age of 77.  Described by Graham Greene as “my favourite living author”, Brian Moore’s dark musings were among the first novels to closely examine the postwar Irish experience.

Born in Belfast in 1921, Brian Moore was one of nine children. Rebelling against his anti-British surgeon father, he served as a civilian worker in the British Army in North Africa, Italy and France.

In 1952 Brian Moore left journalism to concentrate on novel writing. His first book, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was rejected by 12 American publishers before being accepted.

The story of an alcoholic Catholic spinster living in the religious divide of Belfast, it won the Authors’ Club First Novel award and was eventually filmed in 1989 with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins.

Looking back, he said, “I was very lonely, I had almost no friends, I’d given up my beliefs, was earning no money and I didn’t see much of a future. So I could identify with a dipsomaniac, isolated spinster.”

His second novel, The Feast of Lupercal, brought him a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and he moved to New York to write The Luck of Ginger Coffey, about the adventures of an Irish immigrant in Canada.

…In 1952 Brian Moore left journalism to concentrate on novel writing. His first book, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was rejected by 12 American publishers before being accepted.

…Brian Moore’s youthful rejection of Catholicism coloured all of his novels, some of which were banned by the Church. He once described Ireland as “a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction.”

…His essentially pessimistic view of life, no doubt influenced by having witnessed the horrors of Auschwitz, brought with it a lifelong fascination with the religion which he had himself rejected.

…The author of twenty novels, the last of which The Magician’s Wife was published two years ago, Brian Moore’s influence far outstripped his fame, though he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize on three occasions.

Dermot Healy, “The Death of Matti Bomer”

Dermot Healy (1947-)

Brief bio:

Dermot Healy was born in Finea, County Westmeath, in 1947. His books include Banished Misfortune(stories), Fighting with Shadows, A Goat’s Song and Sudden Times (novels) and The Bend for Home(memoir). A new novel, Long Time, No See, will be published next year.

He has written and directed plays, including The Long Swim, On Broken Wings and Mister Staines, and wrote the screenplay for Our Boys, directed by Cathal Black.

The Gallery Press has published his three previous collections of poems, The Ballyconnell Colours(1992), What the Hammer (1998) and The Reed Bed (2001).

A member of Aosdána, Dermot Healy lives in Ballyconnell, County Sligo.

…

An excellent interview in the Guardian:

…His most recent book of poems, A Fool’s Errand, took 12 years to write, while Long Time, No See was started back in 2000. “It was actually finished and ready for the publisher in 2002,” says Healy, laughing, “but I held back because there was something nagging away at me about the narrative, something not right. Eventually, I sat down and took out all the dream sequences. I really liked them, but I felt I was avoiding the real issue. I wanted to let in other realities without recourse to dreamscape.”

And yet the narrative has a certain dreamlike quality, not least because, for the most part, it follows the drift of everyday speech as it is conducted in an isolated coastal community in the windblown north-west of Ireland. As a reader, you have to surrender to a vernacular dialogue in which hardly anything is said outright and almost everything is hinted at. I have never read anything like it before.

“When I was writing,” he says, “I was trying to let the dialogue kick in the way it is spoken where the novel is set, which is just out of Sligo a bit on the verge of Donegal. In a way, I was trying to stay out of it and let the reader take over and run with it. So I would often put the meaning of a passage in, then take it out again.”

The book is, he says, “a bit of a curved mystery”. Or, to be more precise, it is an episodic, slowly unfolding narrative in which there are many curves and many mysteries, most of which are left unresolved: like life, in fact. The tale is told by a character known as Mister Psyche, a teenager touched by trauma and trapped for the novel’s duration in that hinterland between grieving and moving on. He doggedly builds a dry stone wall, helps his father on odd jobs, and looks after two anarchic pensioners, the Blackbird and Uncle Joe-Joe, fetching them their weekly supply of Malibu and cigarettes from the local supermarket. The narrative takes a sudden swerve when a bullet hole appears in Uncle Joe-Joe’s front window, though how or why it got to be there is never quite explained. Long Time, No See is not a book that provides answers, and even the questions it asks are elliptical. Time passes, people get on with everyday life, get drunk, get ill, fall out, make up and persevere. The seasons change but the wind from the ocean is a constant, likewise the mysterious undercurrents of life in this parochial, but universal, community.

…Healy was born in Finea, County Westmeath in 1947, but the family relocated to Cavan near the border with Northern Ireland when he was a young child. In his extraordinarily rich memoir, The Bend for Home(1996), he evokes the sense of displacement he felt back then in a passage that recounts how he and one of his sisters set off in the night to try to walk back to Finea.

“Initially, I didn’t take to Cavan at all,” he says, smiling ruefully and shaking his head. “It was a leap from a village to a town, from a familiar world to an alien one. My father was a guard (an Irish policeman) and he fell ill and died soon after we moved to Cavan. I never had the traumas of Catholicism, but I did get thrown out of college by the priests for going to see the Bachelors [a 1960s Irish pop group] when I should have been studying.”

A cool questionnaire from the Vancouver International Writer’s Festival:

Describe your new book in one sentence: Long Time, No See follows the story of a young fellow looking after his granduncle Joejoe who lives by the Atlantic in the North West of Ireland.

What are you reading now? Earnest Shakelton’s Trips to the Antarctic

Favourite book as a child? Treasure Island and The Tale of Two Cities.

What three writers would you like to have lunch with? Kafka, Borges and Basho.

Describe your work space: A shed looking inland with the sea breaking on all sides.

When did you realize you would be a writer?  Still becoming a writer.

Sebastian Barry, from “The Engine of Owl-Light”

Sebastian Barry (1955-)

Bio, from the British Literature Council:

His academic posts include Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995-6). His early plays includeBoss Grady’s Boys (1990), which opened in 1988, and won the BBC/Stewart Parker Award. His play The Steward of Christendom (1995), was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in March 1995, an ‘Out-of-Joint’ Production with Donal McCann in the title role, subsequently transferred to Broadway. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the Ireland/America Literary Prize, the Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play and the Writers’ Guild Award (Best Fringe Play). Sebastian Barry also won the Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year award in the same year. Our Lady of Sligo (1998) was joint winner of the Peggy Ramsay Play Award, and was seen off-Broadway, and Hinterland, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Royal National Theatre, London in 2002. Whistling Psyche (2004), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), are two interweaving monologues. His latest play is Tales of Ballycumber (2009).

Barry has also written poetry, including the collections The Water-Colourist (1983) and Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1989); a novel for children,Elsewhere: the Adventures of Belemus (1985); and short novels, Time Out of Mind/Strappado Square (1983). His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998); translated into seven languages; Annie Dunne (2002), set in Wicklow in the 1950s; and A Long Long Way (2005), shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and winner of the 2006 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Sebastian Barry lives in County Wicklow, Ireland. His recent novel, The Secret Scripture (2008), was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and winner of multiple awards, including the 2008 Costa Book of the Year Award, the 2009 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year and the 2009 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). His latest work, On Canaan’s Side, was published in 2011.

From the section on his critical perspective:

Barry established himself as a writer in the early 1980s, publishing collections of poetry for adults and works of short fiction for children, though these distinctions are questioned by his predilection for generic experimentation. In the short novelElsewhere: The Adventures of Belemus (1985) the adventurous fantasies of the eponymous Dublin schoolboy are rendered in a series of chapters which demonstrate an ability to move between numerous fictional modes including the detective story, Dickensian urban fairytale and a cinematic cowboy and Indian adventure. The importance of place in Barry’s fiction can also be seen in the way that these episodes are mapped onto named streets and areas in Dublin: in later works, notably the novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), the town and landscape of Sligo begin to exert a clear hold on Barry and his characters, anchoring the lyrical and mythical dimensions to his work by locating his fictions in named and real places, as can be seen in the repeated appearances of Sligo’s Café Cairo. The use of dramatic voices in the complex and rhetorically sophisticated early collection of poems The Rhetorical Town (1985) hints at Barry’s future career as a dramatist with a tendency for extended speeches and monologues, and his next collection, Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever(1989) shows further movement in this direction, consisting of poems of experience recounted by a series of enunciated narrative personae.

Barry’s first full length work of fiction was The Engine of Owl-Light (1987), which loosely weaves together the stories of six different fictional historical characters in one volume, using six distinct narrative strands. Each strand stylistically reflects its protagonist, so that the tale of a medieval Irish chieftain is related in Middle Englishand that of a young man’s growth to adulthood displays clear echoes of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The result is a complex and frequently confusing collection of meta-fictions, in which Barry’s characteristic engagements with questions of history, language and nationality become somewhat lost in a narrative hall of mirrors.

With Boss Grady’s Boys and Prayers of Sherkin in 1990 Barry began what would become a series of six plays “looking for the lost, hidden or seldom mentioned people in one Irish family” as he wrote in the notes to the fifth in the series The Steward of Christendom (1995) with which he achieved international success and widespread critical acclaim. The family, of course, was his own, and would go on to populate two further novels: Annie Dunne (2002); and A Long Long Way (2005), both also based on the fragmented histories of his antecedents. Chief amongst these is Barry’s great grandfather Thomas Dunne, an officer in the Dublin Metropolitan Police under British rule, fiercely loyal to the Empire of which Ireland was an anomalous part. Prevented from achieving highest office due to his Catholic faith, following Irish independence he was denounced as a traitor and lived as a pariah, ending his days a broken and tormented Lear-like figure in a county home in Wicklow, the setting for the memory play The Steward of Christendom.

Annie Dunne depicts in turn the autumn years of one of Dunne’s three daughters (and Barry’s great aunt) in 1950s Wicklow, plagued in her own old age with resentment at the treatment of her father under the new regime, whilst the hugely successful A Long Long Way takes as its hero his son Willie, another Irish servant of the crown in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front during the First World War. On leave in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916 Willie is drawn into the battle with the rebels and is wracked with sympathy for a young insurgent shot and dying in a doorway. Perhaps more tragic than Willie’s inevitable eventual fate at the Front is the alienation from his loyalist father resulting from Willie’s ambivalent expressions of sympathy for the rebels, constituting an impassioned plea on Barry’s part for the value of communication to both family and nation. As with earlier literature of the First World War, the poetry here is in the pity.

Joseph O’Connor, “Mothers Were All The Same”

Joseph O’Connor (1963-)

Here’s the link to his official author website–very interesting things you’ll find here.

Check out the class wiki at https://babineduncans12.wikispaces.com/–you’ll find out everything you want to know and more.  I’m reposting the mini-interview I did with O’Connor over the weekend.  It’s on the wiki, but you can read it here too.  What questions would you like to ask O’Connor about writing?

We’re studying POV this week, so we’ll be talking about that, as well as other areas of craft (dialogue, setting/place, character development, etc.) It’s true, the story is fairly old (for himself), but he was willing and so here’s our exchange.

Karen Babine: “I’m wondering if you could talk about the process you went through to get to the final draft we’re reading. How many drafts did you go through? Any particular struggles you went through to revise?”

Joseph O’Connor: “I wrote “Mothers Were All the Same” about 25 years ago, perhaps before many of your students were born, and so you will understand that I no longer remember all the precise steps (and mis-steps) that I took during the process of that particular story. But generally, back in those days, my approach to a story was fairly instinctive. In a first draft I would simply splash the words down onto the page and not worry about anything like grammar or spelling, or even logic. I probably focussed on something like finding a ‘voice’, the actual sound of the person speaking. Then, when I had written perhaps four thousand words, I would start into the process of refining and shaping them. Usually, I would do maybe forty drafts of a story. Anything less than twenty drafts doesn’t work for me.”

Karen Babine: “We’re studying POV next week, so it might be beneficial for my students to hear something about how you chose a first person narrator over a third person narrator (even a 3rd person limited narrator). (We’ll talk more about POV when we get to Star of the Sea.) When you’re writing, how do you decide what POV to choose? Do you ever change POV in a story when you go back to revise (like 3rd to 1st or 1st to 3rd), if you find that one works better than another?”

Joseph O’Connor: “I am not conscious of ever choosing a point a view for a story. Instead, I try to let the story choose its own point of view and then go with that. Your students will have realised that point of view changes everything in a story. ‘Mothers Were All the Same’ would be a very different thing were it written by the young woman he meets on the train. And it would be equally different if narrated by an all-seeing eye. It simply felt to me as though the ACTUAL subject of the story, as opposed to the plot it outlines, is the naivety of the young man narrating events he scarcely understands. For that to come across, I must have felt it would be better told from his point of view.”

Karen Babine: “This week we’re studying dialogue, so I’m wondering if you could speak to your use of direct vs. indirect dialogue in this story. How did you choose the way that you presented the dialogue? Was it a matter of pacing and tone, voice, or something else?”

Joseph O’Connor: “Again, you ask about my ‘choices’, but I am rarely conscious of making any choice, as such, when writing a piece of fiction. I mean, I do make choices, as every writer must, but I tend to go by instinct. My approach, perhaps a rather idiosyncratic one, is that I assume the story already exists ‘out there’ somewhere, and what I am doing is trying to see it more clearly so that I can write it down. That sounds insane, I know. But that’s what I do.

I feel dialogue is truly essential to get right in a story. Nothing trips the reader up more severely than bad or unbelievable dialogue. When I wrote that story, I was myself young, and so I wrote the dialogue through a process of listening how my friends talked. Every writer needs to be a listener, and a watcher, before being anything else. That’s far more important than literary ‘style’. In fact, no style is possible without it. And as writers, we need to read like writers, not simply readers. So, when we encounter the work of a writer who does dialogue well (for example, James Joyce) we need to study every nuance.

You ask about the issue of ‘reported’ dialogue, as opposed to noting down exactly what someone said. The answer is very simple. I just don’t believe any of us remember entire conversations word-for-word with total precision, so when a writer asks me to believe that he or she does, I don’t believe it, and then I lose interest. Everything we do as writers needs to be focused on making readers stay with us, not driving them away.”

Just for Fun