designs on a writing career

INTERVIEW:The well-known fashion designer Mariad Whisker is now making a career as a writer, she tells Deirdre McQuillan

IN A CURIOUS IMPULSE, the new anthology of Irish writing, a poignant short story called Tangled Up in Bluetakes its title from the famous Bob Dylan song of love and loss, first recorded in 1975. The author is none other than Mariad Whisker, better known as one of the most successful stars of Irish fashion, whose career took a back seat to that of her former husband, the artist Charlie Whisker, when the couple emigrated from Ireland to Los Angeles in 1994.

Today, instead of designing the offbeat, elegant, Japanese-inspired clothes that carried her label, Whisker is starting to make a name for herself as a writer, having just earned a master's in creative writing from UCD. This full-time course, now in its fourth year, attracts more than 70 applications annually, from which only 12 students are selected. Though friends know her as an entertaining storyteller and raconteur, not many people realise that Whisker has been writing privately for years. In 1994, soon after she arrived in LA, one of her stories, Apache Territory, was short-listed for the Ian St James award in London and published in the writers' magazine Acclaim.

Changing art forms can be a successful transition, according to her mentor, novelist and screenwriter James Ryan, who is the UCD MA course convenor. He cites Patrick Scott, architect/designer turned painter, and Raymond Deane, composer turned novelist, as examples of those who have made such creative career shifts. Whisker’s move from designing clothes to writing stories can be understood as a logical progression “because anybody who has considered a creative process in any form – visual arts, architecture or music – is automatically attuned to form and structure. She was already half way down the road. She was where she should have been on the course,” says Ryan.

She began writing in earnest in the early 1990s while living in Cabinteely, having joined a local creative-writing class initially to improve the press releases about her collections. “Those years were very pressurised,” she recalls. “My career was burgeoning and Charlie was away in America for six weeks at a time. Most of the time before we left I was looking after the kids and running the business. I would come home from work, feed them and put them to bed. Other designers could go out and network at night, but I was at home.” Her first task was to write a short story and she wrote lustily. “I couldn’t stop; I’d work up to three in the morning,” she recalls. No wonder her mother once called her a night bird.

Later, while living in the US and restarting a fashion career, she did several courses in UCLA with the writer Peter Gadol, “where I learnt about how to write a short story and plot. But writing courses are usually for about 10 weeks and if you don’t keep up the impetus it can drift away.” Returning years later to a very different Ireland, with teenage children in tow and following the break-up of her marriage, the struggle to re-establish her reputation as a fashion designer finally proved too much. “I found myself right back at the spot where I was before leaving for LA, but without the same support structure. I was looking for something different and my writing was the only thing that excited me.”

In retrospect, she thinks she must have been "some hybrid fashion designer", confessing that she never read fashion books. "I was never really interested in rushing out and buying the latest Vogue. I was rushing out to buy Vanity Fairand the New Yorkerand any magazine with stories." Being accepted for the MA course was a turning point and made her decide finally to close down the fashion studio and go for it, a decision she has never regretted. "It was the best thing I have ever done. It was like being given something you always wanted as a kid. I was beside myself," she says with a smile.

One of the biggest lessons was learning about structure and how to edit – "what James called 'killing your darlings'," and now she loves editing. It took her two days to reduce her 1,500-word story Something New, set in Las Vegas, to 300 words. It was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize in Flash Fiction this year.

Now aged 58 and with her children grown up – “music crazy” Domino works in Tower Records and lives with her and two dogs in a house near the Gasworks in Dublin, while India is in LA, “doing the waitress-actress bit and trying really hard”. As a parent, she feels “my kids give me enough confidence that I have done a reasonable job with them. At my father’s 85th birthday party this year, at least half the guests came up and said ‘your girls made an incredible impression’.”

Though the divorce was painful for all concerned – “and enough has been said about it”, she adds wryly, an oblique reference to the interviews Charlie has given about the subject – the girls keep in touch with their father and his new family. She credits him with their quirky sense of humour and love of art and creativity.

As for her work, many of her stories, such as Tangled Up in Blueand Belfast Girl, are based on incidents from her youth as a tearaway teenager in Belfast, while others have what she calls "an American side", drawn from her experiences living in LA, in a rock'n'roll milieu. Ryan praises her for being "so attuned to contemporary culture, for having a natural facility to track down the appropriate idiom of what she wants to say," and notes also her capacity for hard work. "She gives everything her best shot. There is nothing passive about Mariad Whisker," he says. "She is relentless in her pursuit of perfection."

Her strong work ethic and her resilience are inherited family traits. The second eldest of a family of nine, Whisker grew up in Andersonstown, near the Falls Road, in politically turbulent times. Her father, Paddy McKillen, was a panel beater and sheet metal worker who founded a successful exhaust business. Her mother, Peggy, went to dressmaking school and made all her children’s clothes. “They were very creative in the 1940s,” says Whisker, who remembers her mother on her hands and knees cutting out patterns.

Even as a child she was a voracious reader and still describes herself as “besotted by reading. I never stop.” Raymond Carver is one of her favourite writers. Her next step is to have a novel published. Only then will she feel she can justify describing herself as a writer.

Emerging from a long relationship has been traumatic, but also liberating, she says. “When you’re so busy sharing a life, a lot of your personal moments never rise to the surface and you keep yourself in a place that never sees the light of day. That was for 35 years, so I will be writing from here to eternity,” she says, her face lighting up with a broad, conspiratorial smile.

A Curious Impulse: An Anthology of New Writingfrom the MA in Creative Writing University College Dublin 2009 is published by MACW Press. PORTRAIT ERIC LUKE