JOHN KELLY INTERVIEW

John Kelly with Sinéad Gleeson, at the Silver Threads launch - pic. by Ronan McCall

To celebrate his story appearing in the Console anthology Silver Threads of Hope (New Island), I welcome John Kelly to the blog today for a chat about writing.John is one of Ireland’s best-known broadcasters. 
A SONY, EMA and PPI award winner, he has presented some of the best-loved and most critically acclaimed music programmes on the Irish airwaves. He presents The Works, RTE's arts show, and has published two novels with Jonathan Cape, The Little Hammer and Sophisticated Boom Boom.

Hi John and welcome to WWR. You are an author, broadcaster and journalist. How do you juggle it all? And more importantly, when does the writing get done?

Writing is very important to me – crucial for my own happiness in fact - and so I make sure to find the time somehow. When I was working on From Out Of The City I was getting up at 5 am. And then of course when I’m not actually writing I’m thinking about writing – trying to solve problem – and so I lie awake at night doing that. It’s not ideal but it’s what I do. You have to find a way or it will eat you up.

You have two novels published. I’m curious as to whether you write much short fiction or is the story in Silver Threads, ‘Prisoner’, a new departure for you?

Where are you happiest, in the long haul of the novel, or the short, sharp world of the short story?
 

I can’t claim that I know how to write either but I can get satisfaction from working on both, depending on my state of mind. For the last number of years my novel has been a tyrannical presence but I do have bits of short stories all over the place. On the computer, in notebooks and in my head and I like to think that they’re all fermenting somehow. Who knows? Sometimes I take a notion and I take one out and see how it’s doing. The Prisoner was half-written on holidays in Spain two years ago and when Sinéad called asking for a story for Silver Threads of Hope it forced me to address it properly and finish it. It was also a break from the novel which at that stage was driving me demented.

Who are your favourite short fiction writers and why?

I’ve just finished Daniel Woodrell’s The Outlaw Album and it stunned me. That power to immediately grab, mesmerize and, in various ways, de-rail the reader is what we should all be aiming for in a short story. After each of Woodrell’s stories I felt like a needed a strong drink. I like the Americans – Carver obviously, but also Maile Meloy, T.C Boyle –and many more. I like the high-wire acts. And in Kevin Barry we have one of the very walking among us. I’m a big fan of Kevin’s. He’s the cat’s pajamas.

What story do you love? (You know the one that begs to be re-read over and over.)

 

Call me old fashioned and predictable but I’m rather addicted to The Dead.

I’m sure it was you who introduced me – and An Cumann Gaelach in TCD – to the wonderful Fermanagh writer and poet Séamas Mac Annaidh back in the early 1990s. Is there a healthy writing scene in that county? Is it your touchstone the way Mayo is for Mike McCormack?

Yes. Séamas is an important presence and always was. Apart from his being a long-time friend and co-conspirator in all sorts of carry-on over the years, he was a role model too in that he was a real writer - publishing novels before many of ushad gotten around to even reading novels. He used to talk about Gilbert Sorrentino’s book Mulligan Stew and I’m very conscious that I’m now with Sorrentino’s publisher – Dalkey Archive. They should perhaps think about translations of Seamus’ work. He was ahead of his time and obviously rather isolated in terms of place, and the language in which he chose to write.

In answer to the second part. Fermanagh was, at one point, central to everything I wrote. But not so much now. I left Enniskillen in 1983 and while it’s still the rich land of my childhood and my teens, all my adult life has been elsewhere. The connections are still there but, alas, there aren’t quite so many of them.

What three pieces of advice would you offer beginning writers?

1.Read as much as you can.

2.Write as much as you can.
3.Take your time and don’t publish too soon and with the wrong people.

What can be expect to see next, writing-wise, from John Kelly?

My novel From Out of The City will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in the US and Europe in the Autumn of 2013. To be with Dalkey is such an honour – Markson, Gaddis, Gass etc. I’m talking things slowly now. I have the right publisher and the legendary John O’Brien in Chicago as my editor.  I suspect this might produce a few surprises in terms of what I do because I feel liberated and I feel adventurous. I’ve got the old excitement back and, in my head, I’m starting all over again.

Thanks a million for stopping by, John. Best of luck with all your writing endeavours.

Thank you for your interest and all you do to support books and other writers.

SILVER THREADS OF HOPE NOW AVAILABLE

You can now buy short story anthology Silver Threads of Hope, edited by Sinéad Gleeson, online. It will be in the shops from next week. It is being sold in aid of suicide charity Console.

From the New Island site (guess which story is mine??!!):

"From the parodied etiquette of Celtic Tiger dinner parties to the first tentative signs of new found love in a coastal tattoo parlour, the collection features stories that evoke feelings of sadness, happiness and humour.

Read stories by: Kevin Barry, Greg Baxter, Dermot Bolger, John Boyne, Declan Burke, John Butler, Trevor Byrne, Emma Donoghue, Roddy Doyle, Dermot Healy, Christine-Dwyer Hickey, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Colm Keegan, John Kelly, Claire Kilroy, Pat McCabe, Colum McCann, John McKenna, Belinda McKeon, Mike McCormack, Siobhan Mannion, Peter Murphy, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Phillip O'Ceallaigh, Keith Ridgway, William Wall and Mary Costello."

SARAH HILARY INTERVIEW - PANGEA ANTHOLOGY

Welcome Sarah and, indeed, all involved in the book. Tell us about the Pangea anthology. Who is producing it and what’s the idea behind it?

Hello, Nuala, and thanks for hosting this leg of the Pangea blog tour. The anthology was the brainchild of our lovely editors, Rebecca Lloyd here in the UK and Indira Chandrasekhar in Mumbai, and published by Thames River Press. It’s a book of stories that span the globe while at the same time bringing the world closer for the reader – making the earth whole again, if you like, hence the name ‘Pangea’.

We just had our first gay wedding fair in Ireland, which is cute. One of your stories in Pangea, ‘The Wedding Fair’, is a wry look at the wedding industry, via workers at wedding fairs. I love the tie in with Cinderella and the exuberant product naming. Did you do a lot of on-the-spot research for the piece? Do you enjoy that part of the writing process – research?

Ah, now, that’s a wedding fair I’d have loved to attend… My wedding fair was how I imagine most ‘traditional’ wedding fairs were, eight years ago in the UK. I stumbled on it in a hotel in Harrogate. It was like a very gaudily wrapped gift to a writer, full of religious and irreligious tradesmen peddling wares like chocolate fountains, underwater weddings, floral-and-fruit tributes that would’ve toppled Carmen Miranda… Just breathing the air was enough to set me scrabbling for a pen and pencil. Sometimes the stories come right at you, don’t they? As for my more usual writing process – yes, I love research. I can spend hours in there and usually have to be dragged out to start actually writing.

You have a flair for gorgeous language. A snippet from your Pangea story ‘LoveFM’: ‘...they lay on the beach, love’s jetsam, her long hair roped with sand, his skin grainy with goose-bumps.’ And from ‘The Wedding Fair’: ‘She loved [the car’s] severe lines and narrow nose, the round headlamps mounted on a metal brace like eyes on stalks. Peering inside, she saw the deep buttoned pleats of its seats, the colour of clotted cream.’ How naturally does this type of language come to you? Do you work it much? Are you a fan of lyrical writers and, if so, who do you admire?

Thank you for the kind words. Both stories in Pangea were written a long while back and my writing has become less lyrical since then, mainly as a result of my inner critic telling me to speak plainly. But I do love gorgeous language – what writer doesn’t? I still write to a rhythm (buttoned and clotted, I like the half-echo there), despite being tone-deaf to music. Back then, it was a style that came naturally to me, and I didn’t have to work at it. What I had to work at was the plain-speaking, and to write like that now would probably be hard for me. Little glimpses of lyricism in otherwise taut prose – those are the writers I admire most, for their restraint as much as anything. There are some terrific stories in Pangea that fit this bill. An image in Vanessa Gebbie’s 'Breakdown', of an orange streetlight in a puddle – like a kid’s spilt fizzy drink. Or the plain-speaking attention to detail in 'You’re Dead' by Tom Williams.

Elvis makes a somewhat spooky appearance in ‘LoveFM’. Are you a fan? Do you often use well known people as characters in your fiction, or do you prefer the freedom of invention?

Well, I do turn up the radio whenever ‘Conversation’ comes on, does that count? I think it probably does. I’ll tell you a secret. That story started life as something very different. (Whisper it: fan-fiction.) And Elvis was actually Lucifer. I’ve been told I have a good ear for voices (again, while being tone-deaf) so I do enjoy writing ‘real people’ in one sense, but nothing beats inventing your own characters. They do as they’re told, for one thing.

I saw my first real, live trailer park in Arkansas this year; it was very neat and ordered. The one in your story is battered, ‘the lousiest, most godforsaken spot Johnny’d ever seen. It might’ve been a shanty-town but for the gaudy ghetto touches: neon signage on the biggest of the trailers, gold paint peeling from the window-frames, stars and stripes slung in fraying swags everywhere’. Great description. Have you witnessed such a place?

Nope. And how disappointing that the real ones are neat and ordered. Although in a sense that’s even spookier… What’re they hiding?

It may just have been the one I saw - it was in a dry county, so no drink 'n' drugs culture to corrupt anyone!

You write literary short fiction and you also write crime novels. How do you handle the move between the two? Have you considered adopting a nom de plume for one or the other, to separate your writing selves as it were, in the mode of John Banville/Benjamin Black?

Banville says he finds it liberating to write as Black; he uses a keyboard rather than a fountain pen and the words flow… He suggests there’s less discipline to writing crime, but I think there’s more, or there should be. Crime demands a certain parsimony, I find. Less indulgence, and a debt of compassion to be paid to the real life victims of crime. But really, the writing’s the same, for me. To try and tell a compelling story in the best way possible. As for a nom de plume, at the Harrogate Crime Festival last month, someone pointed out that the most successful writers of the moment have the initials SJ, which just happen to be my own initials. So maybe that’s the way to go.

This is a horrible question, I know, but how do you rate the state of and/or future of the short story? Is it healthy or doomed? Were you disappointed that Costa didn’t decide to offer short story collection prize, rather than a single story prize, for example?

It’s a shame about Costa, but short stories were around long before prizes and I don’t see any real threat to their longevity. I think people are more aware of short stories now, which is a good thing, and sites like Shortfire Press and Ether Books are championing the short story. (Pangea is available as an e-book.) Not to pretend that publishing isn’t fraught with problems, but I think readers and writers of short stories will prevail. The evidence certainly points to that.

Sarah, thanks so much for stopping by Women Rule Writer.

Thanks for having me!

Pangea is available to buy here.

SILVER THREADS OF HOPE

 
The cover has been released for Silver Threads of Hope, the short story anthology edited by journalist and broadcaster extraordinaire, Sinéad Gleeson. The book will be published in September by New Island, it contains 28 new short stories by Irish writers and is in aid of Console, the suicide support organisation. Songwriter Adrian Crowley gave permission to use a line from his song 'Bless our Tiny Hearts' as the title and Martin Gleeson designed the cover.

I have a new story in the anthology called 'Squidinky' - it features tattoos (I like what I like), grief and third-age friendship. I know Colm Keegan has a story in there too and I am looking forward immensely to reading all the other writers' stories. I believe they include ones from Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue. Stellar!