
It was way back in October 2010 that I first asked Trinity graduate, Belinda McKeon, to do an interview with Trinity News. But since Solace, her novel exploring the tensions between a farmer and his academic son, had not yet been published, any interview would have to wait. It was not until five weeks ago, in fact, during the week of her book launch, that I sat down to talk to McKeon. In the time since then, Solace has received both critical and popular acclaim. Yet it is only now, on the eve of a deadline almost a whole year since the interview was originally proposed, that I’ve taken it upon myself to actually write the piece. Deadlines, as McKeon herself will freely admit, can have such a mobilising effect.
How did Solace come about?
It actually started out as a short story I wrote for the first Davy Byrne Awards in 2004. I hadn’t been finishing anything, so it seemed like a good deadline to work towards to get a piece of fiction together. But of course I ended up writing it the night before the deadline, which is pretty typical of me. I wrote it overnight. It was about five or six pages and it wasn’t really a story. It was very obviously a fragment of something – a scene between Mark and Tom, playing on the kind of tensions which ended up being developed further in the novel, the tensions between a father who’s a farmer and a son who wants to build his own academic life in Dublin. There were several things present in a very undeveloped and inchoate form.
Do you know what you are going to write before you sit down at your desk?
No, it comes to me. There’s an actual physical element to it. Unless I’m touching the computer keys or have a pen to paper, it won’t come. Whatever way my brain is wired, there seems to be a relationship between the action of writing and the release of material. Sometimes imagery comes during the off-time. If I’ve been keeping a good routine, an image will pop into my head when I’m washing dishes or taking a walk. But that can’t be a conscious thing. You can’t think, ‘I’m going for a walk to think about my novel’.
MFA programmes have come in for a lot of criticism in recent years. Can you talk about your experience of the course at Columbia?
I went to Columbia with a very specific demand. I wanted to have deadlines. You’re there for two or three years, you have constant deadlines and everyone around you is trying to finish their book. That has a very motivating effect. But I honestly don’t think I got a whit of formal training out of the course. But then I didn’t go in looking for that. I went there to force myself into an action that recognised the seriousness of finishing the book. And so I agree with a lot of the criticism of MFA programmes. I think an awful lot of them are just rackets. I did have a very good experience at Columbia. It was also a very mixed experience. There were some absolutely superb teachers, many of whom were teaching almost academic seminars about, you know, the novel. I didn’t have a class on how to write a sentence or a paragraph. But the deadlines were very important and I met some really terrific writers who are now my readers and peers.
Do you have any intellectual insecurities?
Too many to even articulate. I feel a huge nostalgia for when I was at your stage, when I’d just finished my undergrad and was immersed in so many different genres, reading and learning so much every day. If I have an insecurity, it’s that that slackens when you leave academia. Journalism does that to you as well because you become an expert in everything for ten minutes. When I was an undergrad I would just live in the library, completely immersed in it. I don’t really do that so much anymore. I had such a great time in Trinity. I took each of the writer-in-residence workshops – except one, which I didn’t get into – which were great. The first year I did it, Paul Murray was a fourth year at the time and he was in that class. That’s where I first met him. He was telling me recently that Skippy Dies was started as a short story in 1994. He wouldn’t have been even twenty at the time. I mention that because, as I said, Solace came out of a short story six or seven years ago; Skippy came out of one from almost twenty years ago! These things lodge and ferment. That’s what they should do, anyway – which is why the deadline for my next novel is causing me quite a bit of anxiety. I feel I should probably have negotiated a little more time for myself.
Have you had time to sit down and work on that?
I have had time. But I haven’t really availed of the time very well. It’s a strange experience to be writing a different novel to Solace. A little bit painful, actually. In some ways I feel like it’s my first novel. But I am just doggedly writing down all the crap, because I really believe in the idea of a shitty first draft. Claire Keegan says that certain stuff has to burn away before you can get to the core of what you’re writing. Yeah, you just have to write through the shit really.
The article originally appeared in Trinity News in September 2011.