I went to hear Claire Keegan reading in Achill tonight. She was just great! The hall was small, and laid out like an aeroplane – three seats on one side of the aisle, two on the other. It’s an old hall from the famine times, thick white walls and high windows.
She read just one story, not in the European edition of Walk the Blue Fields but in the American, and set in the Heinrich Boll cottage just up the road. In the story, a writer in the third person arrives late on Achill to take up a residence in the cottage, and is intruded on by a German professor of literature. She spends so much time the first day pinned by her appointment with the GermanIt’s a perfect picture of writing, not getting down to writing, but procrastinating, otherwise known as taking the time to walk, and read and think, and describe.
I was struck in her stories that I’ve read how about a third of the way through or more, something is revealed about the central character which is pivotal, and I asked what I had been wondering in reading them – did she know from the beginning the arc of the story, or did she just start writing blind, not knowing where she was going? The latter, she said, and she described the struggle to fully imagine what it is that’s waiting to be written, the need to read and walk and do nothing to let it out. It was really encouraging to hear. I’m glad to have gone.
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4 comments:
That's a really fulsome description of what it takes to write, to fully realise what it is that you're trying to pin down, without being too exact.
When I went to hear Anne Enright read in Belfast, she said something interesting afterward about how she approaches her stories in a Q&A session afterwards. She said it all starts with sentences, one follows each other. It's a nice to hear that you can work like that, it gives a lot of freedom, I think.
Yeah, Barbara - that's how I felt. Nice to hear you can work like that.
Sometimes when we read the stories in a book, they seem so complete, little pearls fully formed, so it's hard to see how they were put together. It's really encouraging when someone at the top of her craft takes the trouble to explain a little of how it was done
I concur with Claire's approach. In a way I write to tell the story to myself, not sure what is going to happen. That's part of the joy.
I find it usually adds a lot to a story (or poem) to hear the writer read it. Not always though. Sometimes I'm completely put off and never want to rad them again!
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