Introducing Readers on Writers – the series where our shadow judging panel interview the shortlisted authors for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
In this interview, shadow judge Amina Makele (@aminasbookshelf) speaks to Liadan Ní Chuinn about their shortlisted book Every One Still Here, published by Granta Books. Their conversation contemplates what we owe each other, how we care for each other and how this comes into play through writing.
1. Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Young Writer of the Year Award. How did this book first take shape and what was your path to publication?
Thank you! The book took a while coming together. I wrote stories like We All Go and Daisy Hill first; some of the others are much newer. I published a couple of stories in The Stinging Fly, and the team there were very supportive. They were first suggesting that I had enough stories for a collection a few years ago, but it didn’t feel finished to me: I had a lot of stories, but they weren’t a book. I needed the stories I chose to feel like they belonged together. I’m glad the book is out there now, and I’m very grateful to everyone who has been kind and open and helpful along the way, both at The Stinging Fly and at Granta.
2. Short story collections can be difficult to publish, yet Everyone Still Herehas been a standout success. What drew you to the short story as a medium? Do you also write — or plan to write — longer fiction?
I think I focused on short stories because of The Stinging Fly, the short story press, which was, and continues to be, kind and supportive. I like the immediacy of short stories, and the flexibility of them. But I do hope to try everything sometime. I think I’ll do longer fiction soon.
3. Family relationships, childhood and fertility recur throughout the collection. Many characters seem to be young adults searching for parental love or guidance. Was this an intentional theme and what drew you to it?
I think a lot about family, and relationships, and childhood, and what it means to look after each other, to be in a community, to care for each other. We live in a very individualistic time, but none of us is an individual: we’re made, formed, loved, kept alive by other people.
4. Long-term illness and the loss of parents also feature prominently. What compelled you to explore these experiences?
I think a lot about what we owe each other, how we care for each other. Perhaps this is not a narrative that we hear often about the north of Ireland, but it interests me, how deeply people care for each other here, what we do. There is no family, no community, no life, no point without inconvenience, without the inconvenience that comes from being relied on, from being part of something. We owe everything to everyone.
5. Your prose is spare rather than decorative, yet deeply evocative of character, time and place. How do you approach achieving that effect?
Thank you. I have no idea. I try to listen to people. I try not to change things too much once I’ve written them. I love writing very much but I do not like editing. I try to avoid it.
6. Readers will notice your use of limited speech marks, rhythmic prose in the pattern of everyday speech and short sentences. Is this a natural way for you to write, or a style you consciously shaped? What do you hope it offers the reader?
It isn’t consciously shaped. I think that it’s hard to know, with writing, what is especially conscious or not. I think that any rhythm must come from listening to people. So maybe I would say to the reader that if it sounds different, it is only because I do; because I am not English, and neither are my people, and the way that we speak has a shape of its own.
7. As someone who has taken several writing courses, I enjoyed how Mary reflects on the act of writing and feedback groups. What advice would you give aspiring writers seeking reassurance or feedback?
I have to admit that I have never attended any kind of writing or feedback group. I wouldn’t seek to give anyone advice — god knows it’s early in the day for me to think that I could — but I wonder, sometimes, about the merit of seeking out too much the opinions of other people, about thinking too much about how what we are doing will be taken. Maybe we can write what feels true, what feels honest, to us. Maybe we can like what we are doing first.
8. Everyone Still Here opens with a Protestant hijacking of a Catholic family’s car and ends with a list of civilians killed by British state forces in Northern Ireland. While not every story is about the Troubles, they form a consistent backdrop, and the book is often discussed in that context. How do you feel about that framing? Is it reductive, or an essential dimension of the work?
It could be reductive. The framing is important. Even, in the beginning, I was worried about the book’s presentation; I spoke about it a lot with the publishers. There was a long list of adjectives that I didn’t want anywhere near it. It mattered a lot to me about how we, ourselves, were presenting it. But it is true that that violence is at the heart of it. Isn’t it everywhere? What I like about the finished book and its cover and its blurb is that it can be walked past, looked at, and nobody would know that there is war in it; but somebody who reads it, who stays with it, will find, unexpectedly, that the violence of the British state is all the way through it. I like that because I think that that’s what it is like to grow up here.
9. The final story bears witness to people murdered by British state forces in the north of Ireland. At a time when neofascism is rising and states continue to inflict violence on innocent people, what impact do you hope this act of remembrance will have?
I have always been struck by the ignorance of those in Britain who refuse to look at or understand what the British state has done. I think that people in the north of Ireland, and in colonised and occupied lands all over the world, have been dehumanised for a long time. It is as Akala writes it in ‘Natives’: ‘Those who kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are un-people.’ I hope that people will look at what’s happened, at what’s happening, and will reject this desensitisation, this dehumanisation. Most of it comes down to what Rowan’s writing in the final story, in all of the grief and the anger: I would care if this were done to you.