Interviewed for The Writing Show on 27 December, 2005 by Mick Halpin.

January 30, 2006

 

LISTEN TO KEVIN’S INTERVIEW HERE

Mick Halpin (MH): This is Mick Halpin, guest host of The Writing Show, "where writing is always the story." I’m here in Bewley’s Hotel in scenic Sandyford, County Dublin, Ireland. I’m here to speak with fellow expatriate Kevin Stevens, the author of many works of non-fiction and of the recently-published cold war novel Song for Katya. How closely did Stevens’ life as an editor for Boston’s Quinlan Press inspire his first novel, the literary thriller The Rizzoli Contract? We’ll discuss his experiences in the American publishing industry and how publishing differs in a niche market like Ireland. Between knocking back a few pints of Guinness, we’ll also touch on the impact of developing technologies, the role of the Internet, and the importance of reviews in book promotion. Given Stevens’ love of books, we’re certain to hear some proof that Irish literature did not end with musty old James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. We may even mention The Boston Celtics. But first I’d like to learn a little about the man himself.

Kevin Stevens (KS): I was born in Scotland. My father was studying at the University of Edinburgh on the GI Bill. He had served during the Korean War. My mother is Irish. We moved to Montana when I was very small so I grew up in Great Falls, Montana on the banks of the Missouri River. Near the Great Falls of the Missouri which is a series of five dramatic waterfalls first discovered (by white people) when Lewis and Clark went up there. They wrote quite a bit in their journals- it was a great place to grow up in, it’s a beautiful place in the world. But it’s also thinly populated and remote. It was nice when I was eighteen years old to move to Ireland and move to a big city and get exposed to a different way of looking at the world. I went to University College Dublin and spent some years there.

MH: You haven’t lost your accent.

KS: Well probably not to your ears. You and I are both a little bit infected by the Irish accent probably. I think that if there were other Americans who weren’t familiar with the Irish accent they might hear some Irish traces in your voice though you wouldn’t. I spend a lot of time in the US. I’m back there because I work for an American company. I’m back there five or six times a year.

MH: The last time I was going thorough Customs they thought I had a fake passport. They thought I had this Irish accent and an American passport-?

KS: Oh really!

MH: It’s kind of funny how certain things can become a part of yourself without you really realizing it.

KS: It’s kind of bizarre and it’s difficult oftentimes to sort through what is one thing and what’s another. Everything is starting to blend. And that’s certainly true in literature. Take someone like Colum McCann for example who is a Dubliner, born and raised in Cabinteely, just a stone’s throw from where I live at the moment. He’s an Irish novelist through and through. His obsessions and his themes are very Irish. And yet he’s a New Yorker now and so he’ll write a novel like This Side of Brightness which is set in New York which is all about the New York experience. Yet he’s an Irishman with an Irish perspective. You see that blend? It’s a different world now from a literary point of view. It’s getting harder and harder to speak about separate literary traditions as these traditions begin to blend together.

MH: When you first came over here to UCD, that was in the 70’s?

KS: That was in the 70’s, yeah.

MH: Give us a couple examples of how things have changed here since then.

KS: There were huge differences. When I was here in the 70’s it was the height of The Troubles. It was a very politicized environment. Because of The Troubles cultural life was constrained. I was eighteen. I wanted to see rock n’ roll bands but none of them were coming to Ireland because they were worried about the violence. Even though there wasn’t a great deal of violence in Dublin at the time. Ireland was not a very prosperous place at that time. It was still quite dark. We all know the clichés: it was Church dominated, contraception was illegal, there was a huge amount of emigration. At the same time it was a very interesting place to be. Especially to be at University. UCD was a very vibrant place to be at that time, not just for the quality of the lecturers and instructors that were there- not just studying English, which is what I studied at the time, but also the students. Many of them were very passionate about literature.

I was in college with Colm Toibin, for example, who was the president of the English Lit society which I religiously attended. Back them Colm was really passionate about literature. Now he’s one of the foremost Irish novelists. Aidan Carl Mathews was in my class. He’s a fine poet and dramatist now. Richard Carney.… There was a lot of intellectual vibrancy in Ireland in the 70’s even though it was not a particularly prosperous place.

It was interesting. The head of the department when I went there was Denis Donoghue. By that time he was well established as one of the leading critics in the English literary scene and in fact before I left UCD he had already moved across to take up the Henry James professorship at NYU which he still occupies, I believe. Denis Donoghue had a very fine mind, a conservative mind for the most part but a wonderful lecturer with a wonderful feel for all aspects of literature. We also had Seamus Deane in the same department which was interesting because Seamus Deane was- and continues to be- quite a radical. Like Denis Donoghue from the North. Denis Donaghue was from Warrenpoint in County Down and wrote his memoir, entitled Warrenpoint. He was the son of an RIC [Royal Irish Constabulary] officer and so he naturally had a very political past. Seamus Deane came from Derry, from a Catholic background. A friend of Seamus Heaney’s and probably more politicised by virtue of the fact that he was a Catholic in part of the world where it was very, very difficult for Catholics to be in. But they were both wonderful lecturers and they both had a wonderful way of communicating their love of literature to their students.

UCD at the time had the Oxford approach to teaching literature which was that they’d give lectures with hundreds of people and then tutorials during the week. There was no continuous assessment. You had one set of exams at the end of the year and if you passed, you went on to the next year. If you didn’t, you either repeated it at the end of the summer or you repeated the year. My son has just started at UCD and I’m glad to say that he’s got continuous assessment.

He’s not so glad maybe…! But they’ve adopted a more American approach, a modular approach.

MH: That’s one thing I remember from when I started at UCD. At the Orientation they’d say, "Here’s a reading list. There’s an exam at the end of the year. Show up for lectures, don’t show up for lectures, we don’t care." It’s completely up to you. You had much more involvement in choosing your own direction than I found in America.

KS: It’s interesting. When I was there one of the things that I didn’t like about the program at UCD was that it ended in 1900. In my case I was forcibly removed from the United States because my family decided that they would move to Ireland. So I missed America. I really wanted to study American literature. But the only American literature we had in my entire time at UCD was Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter. I really wanted to become familiar with 20th century American lit. That’s what I felt spoke to me more than anything. Particularly mid-western writers. I grew up in the West, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald- I don’t know if you want to call him mid-western or not. Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson. Those kinds of writers really wrote about places and people that were familiar to me, and we weren’t studying those at all. So I had a parallel education. While I was studying all of the Old English, Renaissance, seventeenth century, nineteenth century stuff formally, I was also reading 20th century American literature. That still is my passion.

MH: After you got out of university, it must have been a very bleak time for the Irish economy. Did you remain here or did you go over to the States?

KS: I stayed here for a couple of years, not too long. I graduated with an M.Phil in ‘78, and then taught in UCD for a year filling in for somebody on sabbatical. But then there wasn’t much going on. So I went back to the States. I was married by then, and my wife and I lived in Boston for ten years. That was great. My youth had been in the West and it was really interesting to get to know the East. Particularly a city that had such an Irish influence. Boston has a great literary tradition- it was the literary center of the States for so many years- and yet it also has this great immigrant tradition. The Italian community, the Irish community, the Jewish community, the black community. That whole melting pot of different cultures was a fascinating thing to get inserted into. And also, Boston has this great educational tradition. It’s got two hundred third-level institutions. There’s a lot going on culturally, intellectually and in sports. It’s a great place.

MH: I was wondering when those would come up. You’ve written a couple of books about basketball.

KS: Yeah, I did. The publishing company that I worked for, the Quinlan Press, was right next to the Boston Garden and we had a good relationship with the Boston Celtics Basketball team. I edited a book by Casey Jones who was the head coach of the Boston Celtics in the mid-80’s and who led them to their Championship in ‘86- and who was a member of the Boston Celtics in the 50’s when Bill Russell was a big star there. I also did a history of the Celtics from ‘78 to ‘88, The Bird Era. That was the time when I was a big fan. Larry Bird was the star of the team, then. I got to know a lot of the guys who were on the team and went to a lot of games. That was fun.

MH: There’s a lot of people out there who are just so jealous, man.

KS: It was great. I remember the first time I went to an NBA game. These guys are literally larger than life. That was dream come true to work with these guys.

MH: You really landed on your feet!

KS: We really enjoyed our time there. Massachusetts was doing well at that period. But I wanted to get into the publishing business and it wasn’t that easy. It took me a few years to find a job. I was lucky to find one. It wasn’t very well paid but it was fun to be in that business.

MH: I’d like to hear a little bit more about that. Your first novel, The Rizzoli Contract deals with a fellow, Harry Donohue, who works at a publishing company. How much is that based on your real life? Is the Donohue Press really Quinlan Press, "wedged into the corner of the family print shop on the fifth floor of an old shoe factory"-?

KS: It really was. Quinlan Press was in this big, old building right next to the Garden. It wasn’t a shoe factory necessarily but it was an old industrial building. We shared the space with a printing company which was owned by the same Quinlan family. I learned quite a bit about the printing business and the publishing business and brought that experience to the book The Rizzoli Contract.

We did actually do a book with a criminal, Gerry Clemente. I co-wrote that book, called The Cops Are Robbers. That was fascinating in itself.

MH: That was a big hit. It was a bestseller.

KS: That did pretty well. The paperback rights were sold to Avon and it was made into an NBC TV Movie of the Week with Ed Asner and George Kennedy. I consulted on that project, which was fun. Gerry was featured on Sixty Minutes. It was an exciting project to be associated with.

MH: You had just come over, you had been trying to get into the publishing biz for a couple of years and then next thing you know-!

KS: It was fun. But, you know, one of the things I realized was that when these things happen they tend to be rather ordinary in some ways. It didn’t change very much in my life. I really wanted to write fiction. I was happy enough with The Cops Are Robbers but it wasn’t a novel. It would be a long time before I would be able to publish a novel.

I started writing fiction in my early twenties, and I didn’t publish a novel for twenty-five years. It took that long to first of all learn the craft and second get the time, the focus and the energy that’s required to bring a book out. And then of course you have to sell the book, too. I mean, I wrote many novels but I didn’t sell them. And it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t, too.

MH: There’s an excellent quote by Paulo Coelho. He says that he wrote a series of four or five novels that he later asked his secretary to burn because they were full of silly juvenile things that he didn’t even understand all that well himself.

KS: I think it’s important for any writer starting off to write as much as he or she can but be resigned to the fact that much of what you write will never see the light of day- and shouldn’t see the light of day. It’s about serving your time and learning your craft. I don’t think that it’s an accident that most of the great novels were written by men and women who tended to be at least in the thirties but usually in their forties.

MH: It’s The Great Gatsby that’s really an exception.

KS: Fitzgerald was an exception in so many ways. He was born with an innate ability to write a magnificent sentence. Every sentence that he writes is perfectly formed. And to fit in with all the other sentences! Also his ability to capture voices and his sense of irony of money, really, is a wonderful gift. But it must have been a difficult gift for him in his personal life because he seemed enamoured. There’s the famous quote from Hemingway: when Fitzgerald said "The Rich are different from us," Hemingway said "Yes, Scott- they have money!" But Fitzgerald really did believe that money conferred this kind of specialness about experience that he tried to capture. But he was such a great writer that in trying to capture that specialness he really was able to define what it was about privilege and wealth in an American context that created tragedy. It’s the tragedy of his own life, too.

MH: Who are the Fitzgeralds of today in Ireland? Do you know of any?

KS: There are certainly some writers here in Ireland at the moment who, if they’re not Fitzgeralds, they are writers worthy of Fitzgerald. I’ve mentioned a couple of them already. Colum McCann is one. I think first of all that he has a sensibility that is very Irish in the sense that it’s deeply rooted in the Irish culture. He writes a lot about The North for example and the challenges and of the conflicts that arise out of the North. He has a deep sense of the conflicts that are potential in any social situation. I think that’s a very Irish thing. The Irish tend to be wary. They tend to be circumspect by culture and Colum has a feel for that. And yet he’s travelled a great deal. He’s been all over Europe. He lives in New York. He opens up Songdogs, which is a wonderful book that I am reading at the moment with a little vignette or word picture about how in Wyoming, when they kill coyotes, they string them up along a fence to warn other coyotes off. That becomes a metaphor throughout the book for the kinds of human conflict and the way in which we create warnings through the use of violence for those around us. There’s a deeply felt sense of violence and its place in human culture and also the possibilities of joy in Colum McCann’s work that I think is outstanding.

He has also written about Russia in a way that is fantastic. He wrote The Dancer about [Rudolph] Nureyev.

MH: That’s his most recent one, The Dancer.

KS: The opening sequence is a tour de force. It’s about the Russian experience in the Second World War. It’s fantastically brought to life in a way that’s really amazing for someone who wasn’t there. Colum McCann is excellent.

Colm Toibin is fantastic in a different way. He is more Jamesian I suppose. He’s very discriminating. He has a way of sifting though experience in a very fine way and of getting a psychological depth to his stories and his characters which I think is outstanding. The Master, his most recent book which was nominated for the Booker, is a good example of that. But his book before that, The Blackwater Lightship, was outstanding for its way of examining victim of AIDS and his relationship with his sister, his mother and his grandmother.

That was made into a very unfortunate Hallmark Hall of fame movie. They butchered that badly, but at least let’s hope that it made some money for Colm so that it gives him the space to write other books.

Colm Toibin and Colum McCann are wonderful. Patrick McCabe is an interesting novelist. The Butcher Boy is a fantastic novel. Its great virtue is that, like Huck Finn, it creates a certain voice which is regional, and which is the voice of adolescence, and is the voice of a certain part of the world. Presenting the world through those eyes is a tour de force.

MH: Eugene McCabe. What’s your opinion?

KS: I know he’s wonderful on border country. He’s on my reading list.

MH: When I was asking "who are the Fitzgeralds of today" I had him in the back of my mind. When it comes down to writing these gleaming, very simple sentences with such insight, that’s your man. To be honest, I like things that are new and flashy more than I should. I guess I haven’t outgrown that yet. If someone had said to me you’ll like a story that’s all about the famine, the Church, sex abuse, and Ireland in the fifties, I would be saying "Been there, done that." I wouldn’t pick up that book. But the title story of McCabe’s most recent collection of short stories, called Heaven Lies About Us- stunner! It hits all those themes but it does it with such simplicity and such magic. It’s powerful stuff.

KS: I’ll put that on the list. Dermot Bolger is another writer we spoke about before you started rolling the tape. We have to distinguish between Dermot Bolger the man and Dermot Bolger the writer. He’s a great literary man. He’s an editor, he’s a publisher, he is somebody who is really getting the message out there that writing is an important human activity and that it should be available to everybody and it should touch everybody’s lives. He’s the opposite of an elitist. It’s fantastic that he is that.

I think he’s a little bit too prolific for his own good. But he does have something. The Journey Home was the most interesting of the books that I read. I still can’t decide whether I like it or not. On one hand it’s kind of sloppy. It’s all over the place, stylistically even. But on the other hand it seems to put its finger on something that’s true and that’s essential.

I’ve been reading Halidór Laxness who is- was, he died in ‘98- Iceland’s great novelist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955. Laxness writes about Reykjavik, an urban center but writes about it from the point of view of the north of the county. It’s a bit like Dublin and The West. I feel that there’s a tension in Bolger between his desire to write about a very urban environment and the pull of the pastoral. That’s something that you find in a lot of Irish writing. A lot of it is urban but you find that sense of a pastoral, peasant, oral background underneath. That’s very different from the English scene, which doesn’t know where it’s at, at the moment. England is confused from a literary point of view.

The American literary tradition- Twain notwithstanding- never managed to pull that oral tradition into literature in the same way that the Irish did. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe because they didn’t have as coherent, unified and integrated an oral tradition as Ireland had. The black tradition is an exception. Toni Morrison is wonderful for drawing on the oral tradition of African-American culture that is comparable to the Irish achievements.

Another similarity between Irish and American literary traditions is that they’re relatively young.

MH: You’ve hit something very important there. Colm Tobin, Dermot Bolger, Patrick McCabe…! There’s a lot of people who just think Irish literature stopped with James Joyce, Bernard Shaw, and maybe Beckett.

KS: It only got started with them!

MH: There’s so much out there that people overlook completely.

KS: It’s a great pity. The worst thing that ever happened for Ireland in terms of how it was presented to America was the John Ford film The Quiet Man. Not a bad film in many ways, but it’s a bad film in the sense that it presented a vision of Ireland in the 1950’s which wasn’t at all realistic yet was taken for realism. Americans in the 1950’s were just becoming prosperous and just beginning to travel. They were just beginning to discover the benefits of their ethnic heritage, beginning not to be ashamed of the fact that they were immigrants. That’s when waves of American visitors started coming to Ireland who had had their vision of Ireland created by The Quiet Man and Finian’s Rainbow and other kinds of Hollywood versions of the Irish experience that were so false.

MH: All the same, Bord Failte (the Irish tourist board) has been living off of The Quiet Man for fifty years or more.

KS: That’s true. However, there’s a comparable pilgrimage that educated Irish-Americans make. They come to Ireland and immerse themselves in Yeats and Joyce. Yeats and Joyce deserve to be immersed in.

Though of course Joyce rejected Ireland. He rejected living here. He felt that Irish literature was provincial. He felt that the Irish language was limiting. He felt that the future of literature was in Europe. He stood for a lot of things that many Irish-Americans would be aghast at.

We moved past that a long time ago. Irish literature, even in Joyce’s time, was more outward-looking than he gave it credit for. But I think that in the last twenty to thirty years, there’s definitely been an internationalization of Irish literature. In part because of the Internet, in part because of travel, in part because of globalization and multiculturalism. All those things are contributing to a more profound sense of what the Irish share with other colonial cultures, for example, and what the share with American culture.

MH: Ireland in that way is very fortunate. There are very strong links with America and with other post-colonial countries. That was one of the courses I took here at UCD, "Literature in Post-Colonial Societies." I was thinking back to Betsy Ross and George Washington, post-colonial in that way, but no. There are a lot of other countries that are today just beginning to find their own identity. Ireland has so much in common with them.

KS: Certain books that I have read in the last few years have really struck a chord with me because of my Irish experience. Books like A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul about growing up in Trinidad. Chinwa Achebe, his books- the whole African Experience. Australian novels- Peter Carey. He loves to explore the Irish experience in Australia. You begin to see as you read these writers in English who have spread throughout the world that there are links and that Irish literature is linked to Australian, to South African, to West Indian, to American in ways that are not accidental but that have to do with the way in which the English language itself was dispersed, the way in which English colonial culture positioned itself in relation to the cultural groups that made up the Commonwealth for example.

And now all of these cultures have begun to emerge and find their identity. Ireland was a little ahead of them. It’s very interesting to read them from an Irish perspective. The Canadian experience is not unlike the Irish experience. Not just for post-colonial reasons but also because the relationship between Canada and the United States is not unlike the relationship between Ireland and England. Small country, small population, next to this largely populated and culturally, politically aggressive country.

MH: You have a point.

KS: Alice Munro (who I think is the best short story writer going) only writes about small towns in Canada. Very provincial. And yet you feel she’s writing about the world. She has a Shakespearean sense of the breadth of experience. Partly because she’s so good and partly because she is finding in the local all of those broad themes and experiences that have been spread throughout the world as the English language has spread.

MH: We’re hitting so many different themes. We started off with Irish literature…

KS: It’s all about literature, really, isn’t it? It’s all about the fact that once you learn how to read, once you learn that what’s important is not the words on the page but the magic behind the words, you begin to realize that different literatures are not that different from each other because they’re all writing about the human experience.

MH: Speaking of literature, let’s talk a little about your most recent novel, Song for Katya. A Cold War novel here in 2005-? What prompted you to go back thirty years?

KS: I spent quite a bit of time in Russia over the years. I first went there in ‘89. I was part of a joint venture between the publishing company in Boston that I worked for and the Moscow Worker Publishing House. It was just post-Gorbachev and things were opening up. It was an exciting time to be going to the Soviet Union. I went there many times over the years. I learned Russian. I went to Trinity College and did a Diploma in Russian studies at Trinity. After that experience was over- I stopped going there in ‘97- I wanted to write about Russia and about the collision of American and Russian cultures.

When I was a kid growing up in the United States, Russia was the great enemy. I remember finding a Newsweek in the mid-60’s which had a special on Russian life and leafing through it and being amazed, that they just looked like ordinary people. I don’t know what vision I had of them in my head but it made me feel that they were somehow not human. I thought it was fascinating for an American to end up in Russia and do business there. So I wanted to write something about Russia.

I thought a love story would be a good way of positioning America and Russia together. And the most successful love stories are where there’s an obstacle, so it would be better if I set it in Cold War times because then the obstacles between the protagonists would be greater. I don’t know how I got it into my head to have jazz musicians go over there. I just love jazz. Duke Ellington went there in the early 70’s. The State Department used to sponsor jazz tours all over the world. They would go to Russia, India, the Middle East. That can be fun to have a jazz group go over there and have one of the musicians fall in love with one of the administrators, and take it from there.

MH: You were speaking with absolute authority both in terms of the setting of Russia, how it would have been back in that day, and on the jazz. I’ve never been to Russia I’ve just now been introduced to jazz, but, very convincing. Very memorable.

KS: One of my strengths is a sense of place and getting the details right. I think sometimes I spend too much time describing places! Some people have had difficulty with my books- they find it a little heavy going in terms of detail. If you like detail, you’ll like my books.

I was in Russia a lot and I was there during Soviet times. Even though it was not the coldest of the Cold War, I nevertheless got a feel for the time. Jazz I don’t need to think about. I’ve been listening to jazz for thirty years. It’s what I like. Again, during the editing process I took out a lot about jazz. There was too much in there. I was indulging in my interests a little too much and had to make sure I wasn’t imposing that on the reader.

MH: Let’s talk about the writing process. What kind of writer are you? Do you write Steven King length novels and then whittle them down like a sculptor to reveal the artwork underneath? Or are you one of those people who writes a first draft, second draft, it’s done?

KS: I certainly try to get it right the first time around. I spend a lot of time working on the first draft and I really aim that when I’m finished with the first draft I’m not that far away from the final product. It will take me a couple of years to write a first draft, or at least eighteen months, anyway. But then inevitably before you’re half way through you realize "there’s a lot that I need to change now." My books go through multiple drafts.

The Rizzoli Contract had a lot of extra stuff that came out. It was originally 30,000 words longer. A lot of family history that the publisher felt was getting in the way of the story I took that out, but it was not bad to have written it.

With Katya I was a little more focused. But then again, there were some technical things that I tried to do in Katya that didn’t work so I ended up going back and rearranging. I do a lot of multiple drafts. I think Song for Katya had five drafts.

MH: Did the editor let you make the chops? Did she let you kill your own babies, or was a lot of that done for you?

KS: I did everything. They made some suggestions. I’m at a stage in my career that I’d like a more proactive editor. I’d like someone to get a little more involved. I’m writing a screenplay at the moment based on Song for Katya with a producer who is very experienced and has been around for a long time. He has a great sense of film. The whole collaborative thing is a great experience. It’s great to have someone else to bounce stuff off of. Writing… not that it’s a lonely experience, but it’s a bit like feeling your way in the dark. You go through, you create stuff, you’re never quite sure if it’s right or not. You do trust in your judgment for a certain degree but after working on something for several years you lose your sense of objectivity and perspective. It would be great to have an editor, like this producer that I’m working with on the screenplay, that could give me a better sense of direction. I think I work better that way. I could avoid my excesses. A literary editor, though, someone who would give me some literary direction, but that’s becoming a lost breed.

MH: One thing I’ve been hearing lately is that the Max Perkins editor relationship is a thing of the past. Nowadays you’re lucky if the editor has read your complete manuscript by the time it goes to print.

KS: I was fortunate with both of my books that I had a very good copy editor who went through the books line for line so I got a lot of direction at the micro level. But when you’re in mid-creation, it’d be great to have someone to get into a little more depth and detail, someone to say "That segment really didn’t work, the logic of the plot is falling down here… you’re definitely starting to overwrite here…" Things like that. I’d appreciate more direction. The people are out there but they’re just not paid to do that. Publishers know that people are not that discriminating anymore. I’ve read Booker-nominated books and I’ve thought, "How did this ever get through the editing cycle?"

National Book Award books tend to be pretty good. Booker books tend to be uneven. Some great books, and then some not so good.

I like books that are passionate. I like books that create a sense of a life that is convincing in its own world. I like Alice Munro so much and I like Richard Ford so much. Richard Ford is just phenomenal.

MH: What’s on the night stand?

KS: The two books I got for Christmas are The Sea by John Banville. It’s a long time since I read Banville, and I suppose we should have mentioned him when we were discussing great Irish writers…

MH: He did just win the Booker. We can’t really snub him….

KS: Unfortunately I read a couple of his early books years ago and I found them overwritten. He’s a little like the filmmaker Neil Jordan. When you’re at a Neil Jordan film you feel like you’re watching a film made by somebody saying "This is art." Forget about all the symbolic stuff and just tell the story! I sometimes feel that way with Neil Jordan, and I felt that way with John Banville. But I’ll give The Sea a chance. He’s definitely literary.

I like the South African novelist Coetzee very much. I think Disgrace is a masterpiece. The Barbarians is the definitive post-colonial novel. It’s so wonderful. I’ve been reading a lot of him over the last few years. The Life and Times of Michael Kay is another wonderful novel. Slow Man is waiting for me as well. Songdogs by Colum McCann, which I’ve just started. How about yourself?

MH: Johnny Cash. Stephen Miller just wrote a biography of him. It’s quite good.

A couple of people who have just started out and asked me, "Would you give this a read and tell me what you think of it?" There’s one called Death in the Desert. It’s all about immigrants coming over from Mexico in the deserts of Arizona. It’s a murder-mystery set against that backdrop. It seems interesting. I’m going to get tucked into that.

KS: One of my favourite writers is Joan Didion, the American essayist, primarily, but her novels are pretty good. Whatever Happened to Henry, Democracy is another one. The Year of Magical Thinking is her most recent book about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. She and he used to collaborate on film scripts. They actually wrote some wonderful film scripts together.

James Salter is another. James Salter was my discovery last year. He’s written mostly short stories. Dusk was a collection he published in 1998 which won the PEN/Faulkner award. Last Night is a more recent collection. They’re both fantastic. He also wrote a couple of great novels in the Seventies and eighties. He’s very like John Cheever. He writes about suburban New York, about privileged people. I thought, "Oh this is interesting, here’s a WASP guy who’s not unlike me." Then I found out he changed his name from James Horowitz. He’s actually Jewish. So he’s another one of the Jewish writers that I love even though I didn’t even know it! Bellow, Roth, Norman Mailer. Bernard Malamud is wonderful. The Natural is really like a fairy tale, it’s so controlled and beautifully told. He writes within a Jewish tradition as Bellow does. Their roots are deep in Eastern Europe. Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer and others have a folkloric feel. Bellow has that but he also has that intellectual depth.

But Malamud has that feel for magic that you get in Singer and yet transplanted in an American context. You get that in Irish lit too, that sense that the world as we see it is not what’s real. There are things going on beneath the surface that only tales and fables can really tap into. Halidór Laxness, this Icelandic writer gets that as well. You get it in Mexican writers, in South American writers, in Marquez and so forth. That’s something the American tradition has had trouble with because American literature like American culture tends to be a little more hard-headed, naturalistic.

MH: It definitely has its following. I know a lot of people who are very much into that stream over in the States.

KS: It’s tapping into something that’s essential and that isn’t necessarily catered to by a lot of what’s written in the mainstream.

MH: Conventional Wisdom that I have been reading lately highlights the increasing importance of reviews. Would that fit with your experience?

KS: If you use reviews in the broad sense of the term. If you include weblogs and online reaction- the kind of thing that you do- I think that’s really important. Books sell by word-of-mouth. To the extent to which a review represents word-of-mouth, it will be important. The Internet is our new word-of-mouth, isn’t it? This is how people share information and let each other know what they’re excited about. You get small groups of people into things and exploring things, online. To me, that’s the future. That’s where book marketing needs to go.

You’ve got your bestsellers that have broad appeal but then most books that are published have niche appeal. It’s getting to those niches that is what will get you sales. It’s not even sales. What a writer wants is to reach an audience. Really what I’m interested in is reaching the right audience. That shares my vision of what literature should do. The Internet is a great way of doing that.

Song for Katya was brought out by Simon and Schuster as opposed to Townhouse so there was less local publicity done for it. When you go into Simon & Schuster you get swallowed up. I don’t know how many books they bring out a season but it’s a lot. I got a few reviews but I didn’t get any media exposure at all In the UK. I got some here. Maria Teche does a jazz show. I did a whole hour with her which was great fun. We talked about jazz the whole time. She was great. She had read the book and enjoyed it. She asked good questions. We played a lot of Bill Evans and some Carmen McCray. It was great.

I was disappointed that some of the mainstream newspapers didn’t review it. I was surprised that the Irish Times didn’t review it, or the Independent. The Sunday Business Post did. I may still get some reviews, I don’t know. But the book has been out for four months. I’m beginning to wonder. The Rizzoli Contract got quite a few reviews but didn’t sell particularly well. I don’t know how much reviews do for the sales of a book to be honest.

MH: A newspaper- a week later or a month later, that’s lining cat boxes. James Lee Burke, one of my favourite American authors-

KS: And a Montanan by the way!

MH: Nice plug, nice plug, yes. He came out with his first novel well before all the books that made him famous, the Detective Robicheaux series. Back when he was fresh out of college, twenty-two, twenty-three, he had a groundbreaking novel that was one of those six-column headline of the New York Times Literary Review books. He came out with his second novel and didn’t even get a review.

KS: Oh yes, he disappeared without a trace.

MH: With the Internet I don’t believe that’s going to be happening. Anything that’s out there on the Internet is still there forever if you know where to look. Ten years from now, fifty years from now, if someone wants to be looking up The Rizzoli Contract, "Oh I’ve just read this old book, what’s it about, maybe I’ll find an interview or some additional information, who knows what." They can google or whatever the 2055 version of google is. They’ll be able to dig that up.

KS: That’s right with what we’re talking about. I love books. I love the feel of books, I love the physicality of them. I was in the book publishing business for many years myself. I don’t think you’ll ever replace books in that sense. The Internet is just another way of people communicating, people expressing their opinions or publishing literature. It has expanded the horizons for the way we talk about literature and for the way we share our views and our opinions and our tastes.

MH: Is Rizzoli the Clemente fellow?

KS: They’re quite different. Bobby Rizzoli ended up being rather tough and aggressive. Gerry Clemente was charming, that’s the only way to put it. He was a con man. He was charming with me, he was charming with the publisher. At a certain point in the novel things started to happen that never happened in real life. When I was thinking of him physically and when I was thinking of him in terms of personality, I didn’t base him too much on Gerry Clemente. Whereas Harry Donohue is quite like my friend Henry Quinlan who ran Quinlan Press in some ways. In some ways not. Fiction is like that. You start from certain bases and things take off and change.

MH: What about yourself? Were you Jeff Higgins, the kid hired to get into Clemente’s head (or Rizzoli’s head as it was)?

KS: I hope I’m not Jeff Higgins. He’s a bit of a weedy kid. I based Jeff more on a guy who was working for the Press at the time who grew up in the projects and got a scholarship to BU and was kind of arrogant and thought he knew more than he did. But there’s probably a bit of me in Jeff. I wasn’t very streetwise at the time. Probably still not that streetwise to be honest. Still, there’s a little bit of Harry in me or me in Harry.

MH: There’s a little bit of the author in every one of the characters, even the villains.

KS: There needs to be. I think you really learn that from Ulysses. I think there’s a lot of Joyce in every one of his characters, even Molly. Certainly in Bloom. We all think of Steven as being the young Joyce but really I think that Joyce was very like Bloom. He was meticulous, sentimental and all those things that Bloom is. And I think he was earthy like Molly was. As a writer you’ve got to be sympathetic to, and feel for, all kinds of different people and all kinds of different experiences. One of the hardest things about being a writer is to write outside of your own experiences and write outside of yourself, to have the courage to reach beyond what you believe yourself to create characters that would think and do things that you would think are not exactly kosher to do but it’s good for the fiction for them to be done.

MH: You hit it with absolute authority. You really hit it.

KS: I appreciate that. The challenge for me is to move beyond genres and try to come up with a work where the energy does not come from the plot but comes from the force of circumstance that the characters find themselves in. I like plot. Plot is what keeps people hanging in there. Plot is like melody in music, it’s what your ear is listening out for. The melody is what gets people into the tune but what’s going on around the tune is really what’s interesting. That’s what I try to do.

MH: You’ve got great experience in publishing both here in Ireland, a relatively small niche market. Also in the States. What’s the differences between the two?

KS: Ireland is a very small market. There’s what, four or five million people here? Irish publishers have had to look for co-publishing arrangements with either large UK houses or with US houses in order to break into the global marketplaces that really are the only ways in which books nowadays can make money.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that more and more Irish authors are getting exposed to global marketplaces. Their books are getting translated and distributed. It’s a bad thing in the sense that a lot of books that might really do well just in Ireland are being ignored. That’s been happening in the US too, the decline of the small publisher and the rise of the conglomerate. The Internet has been great in the sense that it’s coming in to fill that vacuum.

Globalization can be a nasty thing in so many ways. I think in book publishing it can be. I think in film it can be too. The producer that I’m working with recently went over to Denmark and spent time with the studio that does all the Dogma films. The great thing about Danish films is that when they make films in Danish they know that this is for the five million speakers of Danish that live here. It’s a tiny market out there. As a result they produce culturally integrated works that are powerful and achieve what they want to without the constraints of going for this giant global market. The Irish are in a funny position. Because we speak English we feel we have access to the entire English-speaking world, the American market in particular. But the American market is ruthless, especially in terms of film. We end up becoming a service industry. Instead of building a studio or a group of publishing companies that cater to an Irish market and the specific requirements of the four or five million people who live here, we end up being a service industry for multinationals. Not that there haven’t been very good Irish books aimed at an Irish market or very good Irish films, but it’s very tough. It’s getting tougher all the time.

It’s tough for me as an American writer living in Ireland. My books get positioned for an Irish market. By the time they’re carrying my book to a US publisher, the world rights are gone. Most publishers now want the world rights for a book because that’s the only way they can make money. "We know it will sell so much in the US but we can get X from German rights…" It’s become very much a business. We’re reaching wider markets but we’re also much more constrained in some ways, too. It’s a mixed blessing.

vMH: What about some of these new trends in publishing, like printing on demand? What’s your opinion on those?

KS: They’re leading to a proliferation of stuff and it’s making discrimination and taste much more important. It’s like the Internet itself. It used to be that you went into a library and knew that if something was in a library, there had been a huge army of publishers and librarians making choices and weeding out stuff that was not good enough. When you go on the Internet, anybody can put anything up there so you’ve got to be more discriminating now. Taste is more important than ever. You’ve got to be informed and need to know what quality is.

So, again, it’s a mixed blessing. There’s a lot more stuff to choose from, a lot more outlets. A lot more ways of reaching audiences but we have fewer quality filters between us and the reader. I know in my own case I want a lot of quality filters between me and the reader. I want people who are going to read my book many times from first draft on before I make it available to the world. That doesn’t mean that I can’t send stuff out there that’s a little more virgin and see how it flies. That’s perfectly legitimate. It’s all about quality.

I read forty or fifty books a year. It’s all I have time to read. Even if you read for eighty years that’s what, four thousand books? Any average library has thirty or forty thousand volumes in it. You’d better start learning early what it is you like and you’d better start choosing that stuff because you don’t have a lot of time.

MH: One of the writing show’s previous guests, Tee Morris, mentioned that there are about 170,000 books published a year- DAMN.

KS: That’s incredible!

MH: We definitely need to make sure we’re getting to the good stuff.

KS: And stuff you like! When I was younger I spent a lot of time reading stuff that I didn’t like because I was told that it was good. I’m not going to bother anymore. I’m going to zero in on the things that speak to me. You do have to pay your dues. You do have to get in there and learn what’s good. We owe it to ourselves to be open to new stuff, too. You’ve got to spend a certain amount of time wading through stuff that you mightn’t like to give it a chance.

MH: Fantastic! Kevin, it’s been great talking to you here today. Thank you for appearing on the writingshow.com

KS: Thanks Mick. It’s been great to talk to you about literature. What better thing is there to talk about?

MH: We wish you the best of luck in your career.

KS: Thanks!

MH: You can learn more about Kevin Stevens at his website: . For the latest Unruly Reviews of Irish fiction visit my own website at www.mickhalpin.com. And of course there are many more interviews and other interesting information at , "where writing is always the story."

Yo! This interview transcript and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it. Irate, huh? Managed to piss off another one? Direct your hatemail to mtyhalp @ hotmail dot com.

Interview transcript (c) Mick Halpin, 2006