Tell us about your new novel, Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky.
This is the layered story of a 66-year-old woman caring for her very elderly mother, who is close to death. The intimacy of care provokes painful memories of an emotionally disrupted childhood during which she witnessed the physical abuse of her younger adopted sister. The narrator herself isn’t hard-hearted, but years of holding her pain in check have resulted in her now facing down the past and attempting some kind of reconciliation, even with herself.
What does it say about dealing with or reconciling oneself to the past?
Sometimes reconciliation comes later in life. Sometimes recognition and true awareness rear up like an untamed wild horse when one is older, to be faced down, acknowledged.
How significant is the Monaghan setting, your own native county?
There’s no other place I feel such affection for, no other landscape that I know as intimately as an animal’s hide than this one. In writing the novel I burrowed in and found a counterpoint and balance for some of the book’s eccentricity. Nature, perhaps, always heals, or is that too easy? Simply put, the aesthetic of a home place has always mattered to me.
The relationship between Frankie and her ageing mother Elma feels utterly real, unvarnished and remembered – are there parallels with your own experience?
Yes and no. The roots of this novel lie in some of my own experience, but while writing, these characters became avatars through which I could extend experience, transforming it imaginatively. The place and setting may be real enough, but the house and events depicted are largely inventions.
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The novel was written and is set during the Covid pandemic. How much did lockdown shape the novel?
As I began it just as lockdown began, I decided to allow the present to play a small role in holding Frankie and her mother and sister in this hermetic non-social bubble. They can go nowhere, they are stuck with one another, just like everybody else was.
Frankie’s sibling Tess was adopted. Why did you choose to add this layer?
It seemed imaginatively right to create a child who has not alone been “rejected” once, but doubly through an adoption which never works in a happy-clappy-Walton family way. Her new mother, Elma, never enjoys this infant and frequently behaves violently to the child. Adoptive parents of that era sometimes had little or no psychological support. Silence was everything.
Tess’s late arrival reveals a lot about Frankie’s relationships. Was the timing key?
It’s typical of Frankie’s life that she has felt herself mostly alone in terms of family, often taking responsibility even as a child when she recalls attempting to moderate her parents’ rows about Tess. So Tess’s late and mostly flaky (if charming) presence confirms an early pattern of abandonment for Frankie.
Since your debut, The Light-Makers, won the Sunday Tribune’s Best New Irish Novel for 1992, you have published four more novels, 10 poetry collections and four short story collections. What does each form mean to you?
My move from one form to another possibly reflects a compulsion on my part to keep probing. I literally love the human brain and people should never be told not tooverthink or overfeel things. I know instinctively when I ought not write a poem, but should enter into fiction, because the form of each meets different requirements of either quintessence or expansion.
This is your first novel since 2014. What prompted this return to the longer form?
An absolute conviction that only a novel would allow me to say what I needed, to rip into a subject that has sat like a succubus on me and allow me to depict a full, sometimes comedic, sometimes philosophical view of our strange-beyond-fiction world.
You have also taught and mentored writers. How has the Irish literary landscape changed?
There’s such confidence now in comparison to when I first began to teach and mentor. I admire the sense of possibility, the can-do attitude of people who attend my classes. My role is to push beyond confidence, to gently (I hope) set someone up with tools, both practical and psychological, to continue the work. Writing is my credo. If I’m honest, anything else is social pretence.
Which projects are you working on?
A new poetry collection is due from Wake Forest University Press next autumn and I have another novel on hand to reshape.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d happily sign off on a 10 per cent bonus in the Leaving for English, music and art to encourage imaginative work and the development of nuanced critical faculties.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Titus Groan from the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake.
Which public event affected you most?
The Enniskillen bombing on Remembrance Day, 1987.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
John Berger, Max Porter, Olga Tokarczuk, Anna Burns, Samantha Harvey, Mary Shelley, Thomas Mann, Simone de Beauvoir, Nick Cave and Goethe. Round table, lots of wine!
A book to make me laugh?
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood.
A book that might move me to tears?
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss made me bawl when I read it in Germany years ago. A story of tragic and complex sibling love at a time of social change.
Sweep the Cobwebs off the Sky is published by Epoque Press
