An interview with John MacKenna. 17 February 2006

Mick Halpin (MH): Welcome to The Writing Show, where writing is always the story. This is your guest host Mick Halpin. I’m here with author- and that incorporates writing novels, short stories, newspaper articles, biographies, histories… Jees, John, what else?

John MacKenna (JM): The odd advertising campaign. That’s about it really. You’ve got most of it there.

MH: Fantastic! Anyway, I’m here with John MacKenna in the Osprey Hotel in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland. We’re going to have a discussion all about the different aspects of writing. All the different disciplines that are involved, and all the different ways there are to be making a living off of your pen.

JMacK: I was down in Galway last weekend doing a lecture for some people who are doing an MA in Creative Writing. The very first thing I suggested to them was that they all get a job apart from writing. As my father would say, "something to fall back on." Some people make a living from it, some people make half a living I suppose. Probably anyone who is serious about it and has a reasonable amount of success will make half a living from it. The number of people who make a full living from it are probably quite minimal. I certainly haven’t managed to do that over the years.

JMacK: I think what you try to do is find something that ties in with the fact that you’re a writer and allows you the time and the energy. Try to find a job which doesn’t suck the same energy from you that the writing does. I worked for a long number of years- twenty plus- in radio. Radio documentaries particularly- and found that there was a complementary level of production there that allowed me to get on with the writing on one hand and allowed me to do other stuff that was interesting but that didn’t impinge on the same energy levels of writing. Each person has got to find what their own ideal companion job is, but I seriously suggest that it wouldn’t be anything in the literary area. If you’re working in something that is completely different from what you do as a writer, then you’re probably likely to pick up more inspiration, more stories, more ideas, meet people who impress you for one reason or another, so. I know every academic writer in the world is saying "No, that’s rubbish!" but I feel that teaching and writing don’t necessarily go well together.

MH: Your fellow Kildare-based writer Martin Malone is a former military policeman in the Irish Defence Forces.

JMacK: Yeah, that’s kind of different isn’t it! That’s kind of ying and yang. There was another friend of mine who was not a particularly successful but I thought quite a good poet. Most of his adult life he worked night shift in petrol stations. For him that was the thing that worked. It was work that allowed him to get on with doing his work while at the same time get on with the creative process in his head.

JMacK: Once you hit your forties I think you suddenly realize that actually energy is not a limitless resource, no more than oil. While people would say writing is not a particularly demanding career apparently from the outside, it does actually make huge demands on your mental energy if not your physical energy. It’s good to have that space there to do other things. For me, I happen to be fortunate at the moment. I do a bit of lecturing for four months of the year and I do some television voiceover work and I do a little bit of acting. They’re all sort of complementary. They all allow me the time and the space and the energy to get on with the writing. If you can find something that’s complementary and that allow you that space and time then that’s good, you know?

MH: Growing up, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

JMacK: I was always interested in reading. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house where books were readily available. There wasn’t a secondary school in the town that I grew up in nor was there one that was particularly nearby, so I was sent to a boarding school. I was blessed with the fact that the English teacher there was a guy who was really, really encouraged you to write. It didn’t matter what you wrote about. I’ll always remember- on a Friday evening (this was in a boarding school, we didn’t get home at the weekends in those days)- on a Friday evening he would always give you a list of five essays, or, "whatever you wanted to write about," that was always added at the end of it. I thought that was great. You didn’t have to stick to the things that he suggested. I suppose he was the person that really got me going on the writing. I remember when I was fourteen I wrote a very short one-act play and he insisted that it be staged. I was writing some poetry at the time- not very good, it was more doggerel than poetry- but he insisted that I send it away to places. I can still remember when the first poem got published in a magazine. It was a magazine called Young Citizen which was a school magazine that circulated the country. Just the excitement and just the amazement of seeing you name in print, that was it. This guy- Ray Kerns was his name- was the guy who instilled a love of writing and encouraged you to write and encouraged you to read and didn’t have the view that if it isn’t on the examination curriculum then it’s not important. He brought us out to see plays, he directed plays with us. I suppose if I were to lay the blame- or the credit- with anybody, really, it would be with him because at that stage of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, right through secondary school, he encouraged me.

JMacK: I stopped writing when I was in university. I got very involved in politics when I was in university and I look back on it now and regard it as a wasted four years in the sense of putting a huge amount of energy into politics which didn’t necessarily bear any fruit. But it was part and parcel of it. I did write some verse when I was in college but gave up on the whole notion of writing prose and really only came back to it I suppose when I was in my very late twenties. There was a gap there of about ten years where I really didn’t write very much at all, apart from some verse. The only thing I had published in that period was one very, very slim volume of verse. Almost anorexic, really, it was so slim. So there was a big gap there and, do you know, I can’t tell you what it was that brought me back to writing other than that I suppose I felt that I wanted to express some things. I had some stories in my head. It didn’t seem to me that verse was the best way to express those. That’s how I got back into writing short stories.

MH: What were you doing during that period in your twenties when you were not writing?

JMacK: I was teaching. I got married quite young. I was very involved in theatre for children at the time. When I say children I mean teenagers. I had started a theatre company for teenagers. I was very involved in the writing end of that. I tended to write with the teenagers rather than for them. I was quite heavily involved in sport at the time. I just went through a phase of doing things rather than writing about them. The creative energies would have gone into the theatre end of things at that stage. I was very involved as well in running various youth clubs and stuff for kids. I went back to teach in the village that I had grown up in and got very involved in community development there. It was only, really, when I stopped teaching and went to work in radio. Once I left that behind, I thought, "OK, I love English literature so. I’m not teaching it any more so maybe I should start doing some of it."

MH: The same way that you had that one teacher who was an inspiration to you, that got you into the theatre, got you writing… It sounds like you spent ten years turning around and repaying that favour.

JMacK: Yeah, probably so! It’s funny now when I look back. I taught in two schools over that period of time and I would still have maybe five or six people to whom I would be quite close and a couple of whom would be involved in acting now who would have been pupils of mine. I haven’t really kept in touch with the staff but I did build up close friendships and would be quite proud, I think, of the work that maybe two or three of those people have done in terms of their input into the arts as well. So I suppose yeah, yeah, you look back on that and think it wasn’t wasted.

MH: Go on, name names! What famous people-?

JMacK: No, I can’t! It would probably be unfair to the ones that didn’t.

MH: Alright, not a bother. You mention then that you got into radio work. How did that come about?

JMacK: That was pure chance, to be honest with you! I reached the point where I had been teaching for eight or nine years at that stage. I thought, "OK, I’ve got to make a decision now. Do I wasn’t to stick with this? Because if I do, I’m going to be sticking with it until I’m sixty-five." I saw a job advertised in radio. Applied for it. Didn’t get it. Then I worked on some local radio and it was suggested to me that I re-apply for another job that came up subsequently and I got that. That was back in 1980. I started off working in the area of music radio but I very quickly left that and moved into current affairs and then documentaries, which is where my heart lay. I was blessed with the fact that my boss had a very simple philosophy which was "try it! If it works we’ll broadcast it. If it doesn’t, well, okay you tried it." So I got to do a huge broad swathe of radio documentaries both here and in the states. All sorts of areas! I did a series on the Amish people, I did a series on the Shaker people in the States, I did a series on Route 66. Did a lot of documentaries here, one-offs with people about all sorts of things, from literature to day-to-day living to current affairs. At the heart of that twenty-three years that I spent in radio there was a period of about ten to twelve years where I was given almost a free hand to go out and try to create series and create programs. To have that creative freedom was amazing. And because of the nature of the work, it also allowed me time to get on with my own writing.

JMacK: In that period from the late 80’s up to about 2000 I would’ve published five or six or seven books and done a whole stream of radio documentaries. So that was a big burst of energy there. And then, a fairly fallow period where I felt that I’d done what I could in radio and that it was time to move on. I also felt that I had written myself out, to an extent, so I took four or five years where I didn’t write any fiction. I wrote a couple of plays because I was asked to. And then in the last two years I’ve been edging my way back into fiction again because I feel that the energy has built up again. So it’s come in waves.

JMacK: I think the thing is that when the wave breaks and it’s not there to actually take that as a good thing. I know that for the first year or so that I wasn’t writing fiction I was thinking, "God I really should be producing another book, I really should be…" there was an expectation. And then as time goes on, really, you realize that the world is not waiting for your next book and that it will perfectly well survive without it. If you can survive, you build up stuff. Sometimes you just run out of stories to tell. And you have to take stock and find some new stories or maybe there aren’t any. For me, I did a couple of plays in that period and really enjoyed that. I got involved in founding a theatre company and loved that and loved being involved in the company rather than just writing the play and handing it over and going to see it on the opening night: seeing it through, being involved in the choice of director, sitting in through rehearsals, being involved in the actual production, stuff like that. It’s a different kind of creativity.

JMacK: So there have been all those waves and breaks, waves and breaks…!

MH: You’re making it sound very natural. You’re moving from teaching to radio to theatre… it seems to me just from this conversation that you’ve always had a strand of those always active throughout and you just keep bouncing back off each other….

JMacK: I do, yeah. I’ve been blessed, I really have. The last ten to fifteen years of my life, I’ve just really enjoyed that process of writing and not writing and being involved in all those aspects of the arts. Maybe it’s the Irish Catholic upbringing/superstition thing, but you keep waiting for the bus to come around the corner and hit you because you don’t deserve for things to go so smoothly! I feel that I have been really lucky in the sense that things have fallen into place. There has been a natural progression in them. One of the great benefits in growing older is that you gain in confidence in your ability to make decisions. In your ability to say, "Yeah, I’m actually going to leave that because I’ve done all I can with it. I’m not going to stay there simply because it pays the bills. I’m actually going to step out and try something else." That give you a great thrust of energy, again, to start something new. It also helps your writing because it gives you a new perspective on things.

MH: You mentioned a moment ago when you were talking about radio you had free reign to try things. If it worked, they’d put it out. If it didn’t, then it was a worthy effort. Does that also carry into your theatre and fiction work?

JMacK: I suppose it does, except the person who is giving you the carte blanche in terms of fiction is yourself. In the radio situation I needed to clear stuff with my boss and get the time and the money from him. Back about 1999 or 2000, I had nothing else to say at that stage, I felt.

JMacK: Two things happened. I’d written a couple of social history books back in the late seventies, early eighties. I was asked to write a book about Ernest Shackleton. Now I knew two things about Shackleton: one, that he had tried to get to the South Pole, and second, that he had been born in the same parish that I had been born in. But beyond that I knew nothing. I was asked by a publisher, would I write a biography? And I was given three months to do it. I was working with a grand-nephew of Shackleton’s on this book. In a way, it was a great impetus to be working to a deadline. To be working on something that I really knew nothing about… I started life teaching English and history, and I suppose that this was the first time I had gone back to the historical end of things. To go back and do historical research. To put together a book that was about the Irish aspects of Shackleton. I found that a great liberation in the sense that the material was there. It wasn’t fiction. I wasn’t depending upon myself to create the story, the story was already there- what I was doing was researching it and literally writing it.

JMacK: Also at the same time, I was asked to write a play for a theatre company. I had been asked a couple of times before that. I did two short plays for this theatre company. I was given a completely free reign as to what I wanted to write about but, again, I was given a time constraint in which to write them. I like- and this is one of the things that came with me from working in radio- the notion of working to a deadline is very helpful. You can use the excuse of having a block. You can use that for years, but if you know that you have to have something in in two months time, then, if you’ve committed yourself to it, you have to have it in. It may not be great. It may not be as good as it might be otherwise, but at least you’re working to a deadline. And also I was doing some freelance newspaper sports work which got me again back into the notion of deadline, deadline, deadline.

JMacK: Writing those two plays and writing that biography of Shackleton… It was journeywork almost, but nevertheless it was something that kept me writing because otherwise I might have just walked away from it completely.

JMacK: The more I got back into writing for the theatre, the more I thought "Yeah, I’m really enjoying this. I’m enjoying the process of working with other people and seeing the stuff come alive." In general you get a book published and somebody buys it but you never meet that person. You have no idea if they enjoyed it or if they didn’t. But with a play there is a greater immediacy. You deal with the director, you deal with the cast, and sometimes you’re there to see what the audience thinks of it. It’s got that immediacy that books don’t have.

JMacK: So, all of those things. In the period from 1999 until last year when I went back to working on fiction- all of those things helped to create a different kind of energy and yet it was all part of writing. And that’s the thing- it doesn’t matter what the writing. I think that if people write, it’s good that they write.

JMacK: Some people can be very Bolshy. They look down on certain kinds of writing. I had three books published by Picador in London. I know that my books did not sell in huge quantities, but they got published because somebody else was selling within the company. When people can be very critical of, say, chick-lit or stuff like this…. They say "it’s cheap, it’s crap, it’s rubbish, it’s just bestseller stuff." But if you sit down as a writer and think about that- If you’re signed to a company and your books are only selling fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand copies, then in order for you to be paid somebody must be out there earning the money. I’m all in favour of anyone who can sell books because it’s a complementary business. That bestselling book is helping to keep people like myself afloat, who don’t sell huge numbers.

JMacK: So anyway! That’s gone off the target a bit…

MH: No! That’s a hell of an insight. I’d never thought of it that way before. It’s a bit of a balance a publisher needs to have.

JMacK: It is, yeah! If all a publisher has is literary fiction, they’re going to go out of business. If they can actually balance the bestseller with the literary fiction with the non-fiction… and the fact is that non-fiction sells better than fiction, chick-lit sells better that literary fiction, and therefore if you can find yourself in the middle of that sandwich and staying afloat, that’s fine. There’s a mixed metaphor! The middle of a sandwich staying afloat. Anyway, you know what I mean!

MH: Middle of a sandwich staying afloat- now that’s creative! There’s a story in there somewhere. You’re getting me thinking Dan Brown might actually be serving a purpose to someone.

JMacK: Absolutely he is! Well he’s obviously serving a purpose to himself as well of course. But I’m sure he’s keeping someone else who’s being published by the same company keeping them afloat and keeping them in a few bob.

MH: Another thing that occurred to me as you were relating the evolution or progression of your career. It seems like people are constantly giving you challenges. "Hey John, here’s a play, would you write it?" – "Oh yeah, OK." – "Here’s a book on Shackleton, would you write that?" – "Well, I don’t know nothing about the Antarctic, but OK." It seems like you are constantly being asked to do these things, and just rising to the challenge, going after them with energy and creativity.

JMacK: I find it very difficult to say no when people ask me to write something. Whether it’s a press release or whether it’s an ad or whether it’s whatever, you know? But one of the things I have learned over the last four, five, six, seven years is that sometimes you do actually have to say no because you can’t spread yourself too wide. But within certain circumstances, I think it comes back to that thing of deadline and that notion of challenge. As writers, we could sit forever looking at the blank page or the blank screen on the computer, waiting for the inspiration to come. But if somebody says "Look: can you do this, and do it in X amount of time?" It’s a way of proving to yourself and to them obviously in the end that yes I can do it. A good kick in the backside, sometimes, is an inspiration. Or the carrot in front of the donkey is an inspiration to get out there and do it.

JMacK: Most writers want to write something that’s perfect, that’s memorable, that’s going to live forever. It’s a fine aspiration. But sometimes, rather than sitting, waiting for that brilliance to come you actually need to do something that is a job. It’s a literary job, but it’s a job. There’s a sense of ego in it as well. If somebody thinks I’m good enough to write something that they could use, then that’s kind of saying to you "Well, we have faith in you." So you can use that as well. Some people send off short stories to competitions all the time. Whatever it happens to be that actually acts as an impetus, use it. Use whatever you can to get your writing done.

MH: Here is Ireland there’s a saying: "putting things on the long finger."

JMacK: Absolutely, very long fingers. We have the longest fingers in the world! It’s very easy to do that. I think sometimes people get the notion that writing is just this magical, creative thing. That you sit down and turn on your word processor and it’s almost as though it writes itself without you knowing it. And sometimes on very good days that can happen, but they’re very few and far between.

JMacK: The discipline of saying "I am going to work for whether it’s fifteen minutes a day…" Go and look at Raymond Carver and what he wrote about writing and said about writing in the sense of having so little time and therefore writing in short bursts. It’s so easy to use the excuse "I’ve only got half an hour a day so it’s not worth doing it." That’s nonsense. That’s what separates people who take writing seriously from those who have a notion that they’d like to be writers but don’t do anything about it.

JMacK: If you have half an hour or fifteen minutes, use it. If you’ve got four hours, use it. Whatever it happens to be. If you seriously want to write, you will fit what you want to write into the time that’s available to you. If you don’t, if you just want to toy with the idea of it then you can talk about it forever and never do it.

JMacK: The other great thing about writing is that it’s not like the Olympics in the sense that more than one person can come first in writing. There’s not just one medal at the end of it. It’s not particularly healthy to be constantly looking over your shoulder at what somebody else is doing. Just do your own thing. There’s plenty of room for everybody out there. There’s loads of books- more books than we need- being published. There are loads of books that are successful. Be brave enough to do what you want to do yourself. If it doesn’t get published at the moment, it may get published in the future. But at least you’ve done it rather than saying, "Oh I won’t do it because it won’t get published" or "I won’t do it because I’ve only got a half hour a day."

MH: I run into so many people who consider themselves, "Oh, I’m this great writer." Well, show me something you’ve written. "Oh, well…no… I… um." They just talk about it.

JMacK: They start with the block. That’s another thing- if I’m working on a particular project, I don’t talk about it. It’s very easy to talk yourself out of something. Sometimes when you talk about something, when you talk to somebody else about something you almost get this feeling that you’ve done it. When in fact you haven’t done it. If you’re writing about something, don’t talk about it until you’ve actually done it.

MH: Those people who I know who consider themselves writers, they just think "I’ll be a great bestselling novelist. Everyone will read my books." They’ll travel the jet set, solving mysteries like Jessica Fletcher. Angela Landsbury, what a disservice you have done! That’s nothing to do with what it’s actually like. It ain’t all mysteries, baby.

MH: The newspaper-?

JMacK: Oh yeah. Absolutely the deadlines, yeah.

MH: That must be difficult because with a newspaper, it seems to me, it’s very, very much facts and putting the information across concisely, clearly and yet in an entertaining type of way.

JMacK: Basically I do two kinds of newspaper journalism. I do sports journalism- specifically for gaelic football- and I do book reviews for the Irish Times. I guess I’m blessed in the sports area. I’m writing for a local paper so therefore I don’t have to be unbiased. I can actually let all my biases hang out and the more the merrier, you know? The old book reviews- it’s something I like doing, but I’m also conscious of the fact that what you say will have some effect on their sales or may have some effect on their sales. And also that the book is more important that the reviewer’s view of the book, really. The reviewer is not the important person in a book review. It’s the book that’s the important part.

JMacK: I just know from being reviewed myself- both well and badly- that you read some reviewers and you know they are more interested in showing the pyrotechnics of their own reviewing abilities than they are in actually talking about the book. And one thing that REALLY galls me- and this is in book reviews and music reviews and theatre reviews- the reviewer who says "it’s a pity the person didn’t write their book about, or their play about, or their CD about such-and-such a thing, because it would have been much more interesting." That’s not the point. The point is they didn’t. If this reviewer wants to do that, let him go and do that themselves. The point is that a particular book is written by a particular writer from a particular point of view. It’s the job of the reviewer to get across some basic information about the storyline is, how successfully they think it has been done, and where it fits into the canon of work that that person has produced (if they have produced any), and just to give people a taste for it.

JMacK: I’m very, very loathe, I have to say, and the older I get, the more loathe I am to do somebody down, because I suppose I realize the huge amount of work that goes into the production of any book, both by the author, by the publisher, by everybody involved. Just to dismiss it without any consideration is a nasty thing to do and an unhelpful thing to do. It doesn’t do any service to anybody. Even if the book is not to your liking, I would always try to find something positive. It doesn’t mean I will always say "Everything is wonderful." I will say "I didn’t like this or this or this," but I think you should really look at what the author has tried to do, and try to find the positives in what they have done.

JMacK: That’s that end of the journalism. The sports journalism- The hard part of it is working to a deadline, week in and week out. The enjoyable part is, because the stuff I write is for an audience that carries several chips on its shoulder, including myself- that’s good fun. I don’t have to be impartial. I can grind all the axes I like about all the teams I don’t like. I find that great fun. It normally runs from May to September. It runs through the football season here and I love doing it. Even if I didn’t get paid for it, I’d probably still like to do it.

MH: That’s how I feel about book reviews. I do a bit of the online reviewing.

JMacK: I agree with you. And I firmly believe that an awful lot of reviewers don’t read the books or don’t read them properly. They perhaps skim through them or they read the blurb or they read the press release that comes with them and they synopsize that into some sort of a review. I think that’s really unfair. I mean, don’t do it if you’re going to do that.

MH: Oh, completely. You’ve got to get a little of the heart and spirit into it if you’re doing the book any sort of justice whatsoever.

JMacK: I agree with you.

MH: "All good fiction is autobiographical." Another point you made in the workshop I attended of yours. Is there any way to put a bit of yourself into your newspaper work?

JMacK: There is I think. Actually, I had a great argument down in Galway with this writing group. I was maintaining to them last week that there’s actually no such thing as fiction at all. I was, partial, trying to rise them. But I suppose, there’s an awfully lot of everybody in what they write. Even in book reviews. I mean, you try to be fair, but obviously there’s a huge degree of subjectivity in any reviewing you do. And I think you can multiply that by a hundred or a thousand times when you get into the whole area of any form of full-length book. You’re talking about twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months of living with characters, living with the book. Even with non-fiction, living with the people who are in the book. I think that it’s almost inevitable that the influences that impinge on your life over that period of time are going to rear their heads in some fashion- either in the style of the book, in the content of the book…

JMacK: Take somebody who writes a biography of a politician. I think their own politics will come to bear on that. Somebody who writes a biography of a writer, your view on that person’s writing and of their lifestyle is going to impinge on it. I would argue with media students that there is no such thing as an objective reporter because all of us are subjective. There are things about people that we don’t like. There are things that we do like. We have sympathies with people and therefore we may go easier on them. Or we dislike something about a person and therefore we are tougher on them when we write about them or interview them.

JMacK: The longer I live, the more I am convinced that actually there is no such thing as objectivity and there is no such thing as even fiction or poetry that is not autobiographical. I tend to write in a very autobiographical style. I’m not saying that every character and everything that happens to everybody is autobiographical, but simply that over the course of two years of writing any book, the things that happen in my life will inevitably almost find their way into the books I am writing. Whether it’s a character building a drystone wall because I was building a drystone wall. Or a character who is planting an orchard because I was planting an orchard. You know, when you’re in the middle of a book you look around at the things that are happening. You have a character there. You need to get them to do something. So what do you get them to do? For me, I get them to do something that I know about. So it’s probably almost inevitably something that I have done. Or am doing. And also, you know, if a character is building a wall- as was one of the characters in The Last Fine Summer- I knew. I was building a big drystone wall around our garden at the time so I knew, from day to day, what was involved in it. How difficult the work was, how easy the work was. How you ended up with a pain in your back at the end of the day. These are the things you feel confident writing about because you have experienced that. That gives you an air of confidence.

JMacK: And I suppose the other thing is that when you create fictitious characters, it allows you that little leeway to, I suppose, say things that you might not say as yourself or do things that you might not want known that you did as yourself and to put them on the backs of these characters.

JMacK: All of those things, for me certainly, would come together and put a huge thread of autobiography through my fiction. I’m not saying that everything in there is autobiographical- far from it! But there are threads constantly back and forth. I suppose that the reader can choose to try to identify them or not. I’m not going to identify them, but they’re there! They’re there, and I believe they’re there for most people.

MH: I’ve got to say one thing: You dirty old man!

JMacK: I said they’re there in some things!

MH: I’m reading your collection of short stories, A Year of our Lives, right now. I’m only midway through the book, I admit, but every single story has had a very strong erotic element.

JMacK: That book was written at a very strange time of my life, actually. The spirit of that book is highly autobiographical. It’s called A Year of our Lives for a specific reason. It was written over a period of a year of my life where I was looking back, I was looking forward. I was living at time where my relationship with my first wife at that time had gone awry. I was trying to come to terms with that. I was trying to come to terms with the fact that between us we had two children whom we had accepted that we were going to have to accept dual responsibility for looking after despite the fact that we had gone our separate ways. There was the whole emotional kind of fallout of feeling a sense of failure- certainly on my part.

JMacK: It’s funny- I have a book coming out in October called Things You Should Know which is returned to that exact same period of time. It’s interesting talking about Fact and fiction. I sent it in as a memoir to the publishers. They tell me that they’re publishing it as a "fictional memoir." I’m not quite clear what that means. There are alternate elements in this book. It’s set in the period of 1992 to 1994, but it alternates. Each section alternates with flashbacks to my childhood. So I suppose, in so far as one can remember their childhood there are probably elements of fiction in that because you don’t remember things clearly. You think you do, or you remember aspects of them. So I think that’s what they mean by "fictional memoir."

JMacK: It’s kind of an attempt to return to the period that was written about in A Year of our Lives and look at it in a less fictional way. Look at the trauma a little more rawly. I can now look back at it from twelve years on, thirteen years on and say "OK, that’s why that happened and that’s why this happened." It’s almost a companion piece to the stories in A Year of our Lives. It deals with the same emotions, the same rawness, the same sense of failure.

JMacK: Which is not to try to escape what you said about eroticism. There are a couple things that fascinate me in writing, whether it’s fiction or fact. The erotic is one. Death is another. I think people are at their most jagged at that point. They’re at their rawest and they’re on the edge. That fascinates me. Whether in the face of death or in the face of sexual love- those are times when people are most open and most interesting to write about.

JMacK: That was a long answer to a short question, wasn’t it?

MH: Those themes of sex and death are present in A Year of our Lives. They are also present in your novel A Haunted Heart.

JMacK: Do you know, I remember exactly where A Haunted Heart came from. It came from two different things. Going back to the history thing, I was reading a history of Irish Quakerism and I came across a little sect that had broken away in the early nineteenth century and become known as the White Quakers. Founded by a man called Joshua Jacob. I was just reading about this and thinking, "Hmmm, there might be something interesting there in terms of fiction." I was on the train home from Dublin one evening and I was sitting opposite a woman and I got talking to her. A woman in her seventies, she was going back to Waterford. She had been living in England since the 1950’s, worked as a housekeeper, and was going back to Waterford to oversee the sale of a house that had belonged to her sister. She hadn’t been back to Waterford for forty years or something like that. I remember getting off the train and thinking, "Hmm- what if-?"

JMacK: I thought about this woman. "What if-?" I brought the White Quakers up to the 1890’s I think it was, rather than 1817 I think it was originally, and I moved them into the triangle that I always write about which is between Carlow and Athy and Castledermot in south Kildare. And I thought, "OK, what if this woman was a member of the White Quakers and something happened and it caused her to leave and go to England, and now she’s coming back to this town of Athy where I live and where she would have lived for a period of her life, and she is coming back to die because she is seriously ill and she feels drawn to come back to this place.… Why is she coming back?"

JMacK: I began to put the bits and pieces together, and that’s what A Haunted Heart grew out of. It was a mixture of history and the eroticism that existed for her when she fell in love with another young woman who was a member of the same religious sect. And how she felt guilty about that and she had gone away to come to terms with it and had never come back. So all of those kinds of things. And the imminence of her own death had brought her back now.

JMacK: So… I suppose, actually, now that you point it out, that’s one of those stories that the whole notion of eroticism and death have kind of fused completely!

MH: It’s a good read.

JMacK: Thank you, thank you.

MH: A Haunted Heart and your play Breathless- you would think that these are totally different things. One is a historical romance, I guess you could be calling it. The other one is a play about women who have disappeared- murdered- here in contemporary Ireland. You would think that is different in time, in approach, in content. But I walked out of the theatre think there was a lot that was similar: the sex and the death, the stories within stories….

JMacK: Yeah, my wife read the draft of the play and said to me, "You know, normally people die during your books. In this play you start off with four women dead before you’ve actually begun it at all!" Living as I do in south Kildare, over the last fifteen years, quite a number of women have disappeared. An area of thirty mile radius or forty mile radius- a lot of women have disappeared in that area, in the Midlands. And I was fascinated by this. Not so much by who is responsible, but really about the effect that it has had on the community. So I approached a director whom I know and asked her would she be interested in directing a play about women who had gone missing and she said "yes, can I see it?" And I said "I don’t have the play yet, I have an idea."

JMacK: We had auditions. I wrote the first page of the play, that was all. We auditioned twenty women for the play and we chose four people. When we had chosen the four actresses we still didn’t have the play. I gave each of the actresses a seventy-five question questionnaire about themselves. Everything from their name to whether they were single or married, where they lived, how many kids they had, what their favourite CD was, what they worked at, etc etc. It went from very banal kinds of things into the more dark areas. I asked each of them how they disappeared, what happened when they disappeared, how they were killed… because they all were killed, in the play. I took those four questionnaires and I took some of the material out of it. Some of it I couldn’t use and some of it I didn’t use, but I wrote the play around the four questionnaires from the four actresses.

JMacK: Now, as it transpired, between the time of the auditions and the time of the play going into production, one of the actresses got a job, one got a place in rada in London, one got sick and one moved away, so in fact we ended up with four completely different actresses. But, the script of the play was built around the perception of what those original four actresses had of what might have happened to them.

JMacK: And in all of the cases, funnily enough, the idea of sexual degradation, of rape, of sexual violence came up in all four. I used that as a map around which to build the play. So, yes- there are similarities but in fact that’s kind of coincidental in the sense that I based the play on what the four missing women- for want of a better phrase- told me about their own lives. Each of the actresses knew that the character she was playing was dead before the play began and it was really a backward look. It is coincidental that each of them came up with the notion of sexual, physical violence against them, leading to their death. Maybe not surprisingly, I suppose, but I left it to them to decide what had happened, how it had happened, and who was responsible.

MH: That seems a very innovative, creative way to be crafting a play. I’ve never heard of it done line that.

JMacK: It was a very interesting way to do it. It did require a huge degree of trust between the actresses and myself in the sense that they trusted me to get into their parts and I did say to them, "Look, you’re not writing as yourself, but if you want to put aspects of yourself into it-" and I think that a number of them did. There was that element of trust. And then they trusted me with the information to try to build a play around it.

JMacK: It was interesting because two of the actresses who were originally cast in the parts did come and see the play. From talking to them after, they felt happy that I had done justice to the characters they had created. One of them said that she found it extremely odd because she was looking at somebody on stage who was playing a part that, really, she had created. She found that quite disturbing and quite upsetting and yet quite intriguing.

JMacK: I had never written a play using that kind of modus operandi before but I found it interesting. I think it would only work if you have the trust of the people you work with and if they trust you and you trust them. It was an interesting way to approach something. The idea was there but I felt, "If I can get these four women to tell me what it might have been like for them, then I can write a truer account of their lives."

MH: And you’ve said that you’ve submitted it, with a couple revisions, to the Abbey Theatre here in Dublin?

JMacK: Yeah, one of the interesting things. It went on a tour of the country. We were on the road with it for six weeks with it in various places. The theatre company that did it is named Mend and Make Do and it’s well named. It’s on a non-existent budget. I ended up not just writing it but also being the stage manager and doing the lighting. From sitting in right through the six, eight weeks or rehearsals and the sitting through the performances every night, there were things that I learned as I went that I thought did and didn’t work. So I’ve done a reasonably severe re-draft on it at the end of the run and submitted it. I thought it might be the kind of play that perhaps the Peacock Theatre, which is part of the Abbey in Dublin, might be interested in. So it’s gone there. I have no idea whether it will succeed or not, but I thought I’d like to try to give it a larger life than the one we managed to give it when we were on tour.

MH: Best of luck!

JMacK: Thank you.

MH: When I started off the conversation, I was thinking that you would be telling me about rigid discipline. "When writing with the newspaperman’s hat on you must follow this rule, that rule, this rule…." You make it sound so natural.

JMacK: Yeah, I think it is really. You know, it’s all about writing. It brings us back to people being critical of people writing bestsellers or whodunits or murders or Westerns or chick lits or whatever it happens to be. It’s all an energy, it’s a creative energy. One man’s creativity is not necessarily another’s, but that’s what it’s about. It’s just about wanting to write. To express stuff, to get it down on paper. And then either get it into a reader’s hands or an actor’s mouth. It’s the same thing. Same thing.

MH: What’s on your nightstand at the moment?

JMacK: I’m reading a biography of John Clare, the English poet, because I’m working on a play about John Clare. I did a play about him back in 1994 which I was never completely happy with and I want to revisit it this autumn, so there’s a very, very hefty tome about him. There’s a biography of Johnny Cash which I’m also reading.

MH: Is that Stephen Miller’s? I just finished that!

JMacK: Oh you are! Right. Well I’m in the early stages of it actually at the moment. I’m only about forty pages in. There are probably six or seven books of poetry. There’s a Best of Billy Collins there because I love his poetry. One of the things I don’t do, actually… When I’m writing I don’t read. I’ve made a point, when I’m working on a book, of not reading other books. Certainly not books in that area. So my diet, when I’m writing, is poetry. I read poetry voraciously anyway. I have hundreds, probably thousands of books of poetry. I just love reading poetry. I find it very relaxing. So there will always be four or five or six books of poems beside the bed. But the big one at the moment, the one at the moment, the one I would be full into at the moment would be the John Clare biography, with Johnny Cash close behind. Strange combination of John Clare and Johnny Cash, but it’s OK.

MH: Cash was a poet.

JMacK: He was, he sure was. Those last four albums he did- wow.

MH: The American Recordings.

JMacK: Absolutely superb. Wow!

MH: I grew up with my father listening to the Waylon and Willy and the Johnny Cash. Then I moved on in musical taste. I remember back in the mid-90’s when Cash’s first American Recordings album came out. There’s a song on there called "Drive On" that just really hit. One of the best songs of the 90’s.

JMacK: It was wonderful to see somebody have that resurrection of a career and such a powerful resurrection! Rick Rubin did such a fantastic job of getting to the heart of the man and getting him to the heart of all those songs. It was a great way for him to finish his life and finish his career. It’s a good way to go, really. To go out on a high like that…. (He said, hopefully-!)

MH: Whose writing really impresses you?

JMacK: There’s a guy called Dennis O’Driscoll, an Irish poet whose work I absolutely adore. He’s really, really powerful. I would tend not to be a great person at spotting the up and coming waves. I would tend to go back to the people that I trust, and re-read. D.H. Laurence would be one. H.E. Bates would be another. Dylan Thomas’s poetry I love. I always have music on when I’m writing. I would constantly listen to Leonard Cohen. I love his songs, I love his poems, I love his books of prose. Thomas Hardy is another person I would constantly go back to. The novelists I read would be of a period and they would tend to be English and they would tend to be of a kind of rural background. I love Raymond Carver’s short stories but I feel his poems are even more powerful. Those are the kind of people, to be honest with you, I would rely on for solace and for entertainment and for reassurance and for inspiration.

MH: Anything that I haven’t mentioned that you’d like to talk about?

JMacK: No, I think you’ve covered a mountain of stuff there really. Much more than I even thought about. You got me thinking about things I hadn’t even thought about before this.

MH: Do you have a website? Are there contact details where people could go to learn more?

JMacK: I don’t have a website. I’ll give them an email address which is for the theatre company that I am involved in which is mendandmakedo at hotmail dot com.

MH: Very good. And of course your works are available through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and other places like that.

JMacK: And the back of any good second-hand bookshop!

MH: Excellent! Well, John, it’s been great talking to you today.

JMacK: You too! I really enjoyed it. And thank you very much.

This interview transcript is copyright 2006 Mick Halpin. Mick Halpin is webmaster of Critical Mick: Reviews Free of Rules, www.mickhalpin.com. You can reach Mick at mtyhalp at hotmail dot com.